Wakefield (3 page)

“Dentists,” sparkles one woman, showing her perfect teeth. “We are dentists' wives.” They look pleased. Being dentists' wives on vacation while their husbands are stuck in workshops discussing the latest advances in the profession makes them happy. They are out at night in a lovely, historic city, the leaves are rustling in the darkly scented sweet-olive trees, a golden statue of Joan of Arc is glowing in the park across the street, and a not unattractive Russian guy is flattering them in a charming accent. Could anything be better?

Ivan shares their delight, but for Wakefield it's not that simple. He imagines row upon row of dazzling white teeth filling a large auditorium. He's lecturing ironically about human evolution and tooth development. In the beginning humanity had strong teeth and ate bark and roots. Then a chosen few grew fangs that pierced flesh. There followed a long, dark period of cavities, infections, death. Medieval dentistry. Wooden teeth. Then the light: anesthetics, fillings, scrimshaw, braces, esthetics. In the future, he tells his audience, teeth will have computer chips in them, analyzing diet, giving advice, e-mailing the dentist at the first sign of decay. He receives a standing ovation.

“What's love got to do, got to do with it,” Ivan sings along with the jukebox in his funny accent, and then he answers: “Everything, my friends. I love the bartenderess! She will make me five babies!”

The Midwestern wives high-five him.

“And one of them will be a new Stalin,” quips Wakefield.

“In American parlance, you are a bringdown, Comrade Wakefield. When you are in love you know the truth,” the Russian says grandly, basking in the adoration of the tourist ladies.

“You mean he's a
downer,
” one of them giggles.

Though Wakefield mostly tells himself everything, he won't admit that lately he has been feeling less skeptical about life. He's been day-dreaming about working less and reading more, about regular walks along the river, having the
New York Times
delivered, indulging in a sexual adventure now and then. No wonder the Devil walked right in.

The dentists' wives, warmed by the martinis, are glowing, casting a golden light that gleams off the barfly's nose ring, Zamyatin's bald head, the gin bottle in the bartendress's hand as it hovers over a martini glass. Wakefield struggles not to feel optimistic. Optimism could wreck his career.

The beautiful bartendress, whose name is actually Mitch, cashes out, her shift over. She drapes herself on Zamyatin's lap. On cue, the two tourists down their martinis and stand up to leave.

“What about the tour?” pleads the Russian.

“Maybe some other time.” Their teeth gleam.

“Bye-bye, be sure to see everything,” mocks Mitch, waving the end of a braided pigtail.

“Mitchka,” Zamyatin intones, “don't be jealous. I will tell you a story about Russian men. For ten years before the end of communism, Russian men were becoming impotent. My friend at the Psychology Institute in Moscow studied the problem. He discovered that the future made them so nervous they couldn't perform. Only true love could make them men again.”

“The future?” Mitch wiggles herself into a position of greater comfort. “I'm going to go back to school. I'm making good money now, but what about when I'm old? I'm thinking of studying nursing. Or Web design. Ivan, what did you do before you were a taxi driver?”

“I was an Arctic architect. Did you know that buildings in the tundra sink as much as five meters every year, so every year the second floor becomes the first floor? Eventually, the top floor becomes the first floor and everyone lives under the ground.”

“Didn't Dostoevsky write something about that?” Wakefield feels the need to say, even though he knows it's lame. He's annoyed by the lovebirds.

“Sad profession, architecture,” Zamyatin sighs. “Churches, sad. Big buildings, very sad. Official buildings, sad, sad. Wolves don't need architecture. Nature makes caves for them. Animals don't build anything, except for birds and rodents, and they make nests from whatever they can find.”

“Yeah, it's like my apartment,” says Mitch. “I find things and I take them home, but I'll have to move soon because there is hardly any room for me anymore.” She whips her head around. One of her pigtails smacks Wakefield on the neck, the other gets tangled in the Russian's beard. “Sorry.” She yanks her pigtail out of the scraggly salt-and-pepper beard and jumps to her feet.

“I've got to go wash up and get high,” she says matter-of-factly. “I'm in hot pursuit of the better person I know I am when I'm high. Be right back.”

“Please don't wash,” Ivan calls after her.

“That'll be on your tombstone,” says Wakefield.

“You're a tombstone,” says Zamyatin. “A ten-story one and sinking rapidly.”

The ten-story tombstone reminds Wakefield of something from the past, and he laughs. “Do you remember the Swede?”

“Do I? I can still see that red beard up in the air every time I take a leak. Everybody talked to him, you know. They confessed to him, like he was a freaky priest!”

Wakefield had met Zamyatin in the Arctic circle, at the research station at Outpost Mountain, where he'd been sent to write a story for
National Cartographic
about the international team that spent six months there studying the feasibility of living and building on ice. Zamyatin was one of two Russian architects, the fun one. The other one was a tormented teetotaler who never spoke. Happily, Zamyatin made up for it by filling the endless Arctic twilight with extravagant stories. At the onset of winter one of the team members, a Swedish meteorologist, died suddenly of a heart attack. Only a week earlier his body might have been transported by air to Anchorage, but the winter storms had already started and no planes could fly. At first they kept the dead Swede just outside one of the tents, wrapped in plastic, but the wind tore the plastic away and nearly made off with the body. Then they slid the body into a sleeping bag, secured it with nylon ropes, and staked them to the ice. The wind tore the sleeping bag and all the covers thereafter, so the first man to make his way to the latrine every morning had to cover the red-bearded corpse again. After a couple of weeks, they ran out of things to cover him with, so they just scraped away the snow every few days, to keep him from disappearing. Perhaps to reduce his creepiness, the remaining scientists created a playful mythology around the dead meteorologist, who became, among other things, a kind of father confessor. It was not unusual to find one of them carrying on an intimate conversation with the corpse, but then, of course, there was no need to whisper because the wailing winds were loud enough to drown any human voice.

“The shit I told him I never told anyone!” Zamyatin nods. “My roommate in the mental hospital was just about as quiet as the Swede. I told him everything, too, but then the fucker came out his catatonia and ratted on me. No, I really liked the Swede.”

Wakefield had also liked him. He'd had his moments with the body, addressing it with rambling monologues about his wife (now ex-wife), Marianna. The Arctic night does funny things. He hadn't found it all that strange to sit there wrapped like a mummy in the swirling snow, telling all to a corpse. In fact, all his conversations during those surreal months had been huge, epic, unequaled since. He and Zamyatin had spent twenty-hour stretches discussing everything. For all that talking, though, what he remembered most was the profound solitude of the Arctic. All their millions of words fit in a thimble and vanished in the night.

The memory of those days lifts Wakefield's spirits. I swear by the dead Swede's red beard that I'll get the better of you, Beelzebub. The Devil's weary face floats before his eyes and he knows, with a certainty born on the spot, that his Satanic Majesty shares with him an inclination to loneliness.

By the time he leaves the bar, Wakefield is already feeling freer; the little nubs of vestigial wings are already itching under the skin over his shoulder blades. All he needs to beat the Devil is some imagination. Of course, imagination can be a problem in middle age. When he was a kid the Rimbaud faucet was on full blast; possibilities poured out of it decked in colors like a dragon at Chinese New Year. At fifteen, imagination slunk around like a mermaid in sequins with a sex of fire. But soon enough real bodies and sentiments got pasted onto his fantasies like labels, and imagining began to feel foolish.

And now it's as if he's been given a sabbatical from the life he'd long believed he was living. He is free to consider alternative lives. He decides to make a list of possibilities to exercise his wings.

1. What if …

2. Whatever happened to …

He tries to think more specifically.

3. What if instead of her was her.

4. What if instead of here was there.

5. What if I wasn't me.

6. What the hell does the Devil mean by that starter pistol?

His listing is interrupted by his cell phone, which, in this story, is never the starter pistol, though it is demonic. He lets the caller leave a message, then takes it out of his pocket and looks at the caller ID. Zelda, his best ex-girlfriend and travel agent. Zelda books the flights for his lecture tours. He calls her back but gets her machine. He's supposed to leave for the Midwest the next afternoon.

Once upon a time Zelda and Wakefield dated, as they say. Sometimes they actually went out, but mostly they stayed indoors because the relationship seemed cursed by unnaturally bad weather. Whenever they planned an outing, a sudden rainstorm or an unusual wind would mess up her hair, tear off his hat, collapse the umbrella. These events were so common that they called them WZ moments, after their initials. After the fiftieth WZ moment, the joke got old.

Zelda was then an associate professor of anthropology, and about the time the joke got old, her studies took her to Siberia. There she met a young shaman, the youngest member of the Shaman Union, formed after the collapse of the Soviet one. He had magical powers, as real shamans do; one of which infused Zelda with an irresistible crush. She decided to stay on in Siberia, where the weather was surprisingly better than it had been on any of Wakefield's dates with her. One day she returned, heartbroken. Her shaman boy-lover had been lost hunting alone. His body was never found, but Zelda received psychic messages from him. One of these instructed her never to resume a romantic relationship with Wakefield.

Zelda wrote an account of her Siberian adventure that was rejected by every academic publication she offered it to, even though she tried her best to keep the “paranormal” references to a minimum. She was denied tenure at the university because of her long absence and failure to publish. Zelda took this not entirely unexpected outcome in stride, and on the counsel of her ghostly lover, she purged the essay of academic jargon and published it as a paperback for popular consumption. The book was a best-seller. With the profits Zelda opened Crossroads Travel, and cultivated a select clientele of people interested in traveling to places where magic is still practiced. Crossroads Travel advertised only in New Age publications, and several cable networks featured programs with Zelda in exotic locales, communing with loin-clothed pygmies or saffron-robed monks.

Wakefield never took her special tours, but Zelda booked all his professional flights, which were mostly to very ordinary places. This service, which could have been performed by any travel agent, came with an educational component, however. For instance, when Wakefield complained that he didn't get enough exercise because he flew too much, Zelda gently lectured him.

“You have to change your perspective on everything, especially flying. Flying is your dharma, your karma, but it can also be your yoga. When it rained and stormed on us all the time, it was because of our inattention. I am normally a very observant person, but something happened when I was with you. I lost my edge; everything looked blurry like I wasn't wearing my glasses. You always were the absentminded type, which was charming for a while, but was annoying as hell when
you
stopped wearing your glasses. You also snore. Anyway, when both of us became inattentive, the universe responded with bad weather.”

Wakefield listened to this analysis with growing astonishment until he had to interrupt. “But Zelda, why in God's name would the universe care about us in such an … attentive way? Rain and wind drench and smack everybody! Do you mean to say that all the innocent bystanders to our moments were victims of this … attention … by the universe?” Wakefield rarely invoked God, but it seemed appropriate.

“I can't explain this, Wakefield,” she said impatiently, “but I'm convinced that the only way for you to become more focused and more observant is to be confined in a small place with a narrow field of vision, where you can't move very much and have limited opportunities to complain, a place where you can go deeply into yourself and think beyond your usual parameters. If you just learn some simple breathing exercises and some minimal physical ones, you will evolve so fast it will scare you. That airplane seat is your yoga mat, Wakefield. Flying can be your yoga practice. Now let me teach you some breathing exercises.”

Wakefield had declined her offer and left her office in irritation. It started raining as soon as he was out the door. He arrived home soaked. After a few drinks and a long phone conversation with Ivan “Reality Check” Zamyatin, he decided to give Zelda another chance. The truth was that she was efficient, she knew his preferences, she had all his frequent flier numbers on file, and she took care of rental cars, hotels, and whatever else he needed. He was too lazy to start over with someone else.

So he invited her over one evening to begin his lessons.

Zelda arrived wearing leotard and tights under her long coat. She sat in the lotus position, and Wakefield sat awkwardly cross-legged. She made him pretend that he was in an airplane seat, though he had never met such a full-bosomed noisily breathing yogin on any airplane. No matter. He closed his eyes and listened. He held his breath and counted, exhaled and pretended to relax, visualized a bright lotus flower on top of his head, slowed his heartbeat (or thought he had), followed the path of his breath through his entire body including his toes, let the light into his belly button, and generally obeyed every syllable of Zelda's instruction, hearing at the same time a familiar sound of sexual excitement that made its (surely) unconscious way between her syllables. He even tried (unsuccessfully) to temper his erection. His penis had never been a very good student.