Wakefield (32 page)

“Sorry. I just thought …”

“Okay, I'll tell you what's really American. The fort was our first structure. It's going to be our last. Now, my purpose in bringing you here is not just to listen to me yammer. I want to offer you a place in our community, because my wife thinks that you are one of the most original thinkers of our time, a conclusion based on rather thin evidence in my opinion, but I looked into it myself and she may be right, if you can see the light. We need smart people for our broadcast studio. It will be the only one left functioning after the war, and your face could be the face of hope for anybody left out there.”

Wakefield doesn't know if he should be flattered or run as fast as he can. He'd like to laugh, but he can't do that either. He's just been offered a comfortable afterlife, a hell of a lot better deal than the one he has with the Devil. But for some reason, he trusts his own Devil a lot more.

“You don't have to give me an answer right away, Mr. Wakefield,” Redbone says, reading him like a newspaper, “but give it some thought. Here's something to help you ponder.” Redbone holds out a gold coin. “Here, take it. It's Greek, fifth century B.C., the golden age of Pericles. It's a bonus. Your fee has already been deposited in your bank account.” He takes Wakefield's hand, puts the coin in his palm, closes Wakefield's fingers over it. “And I appreciate your keeping all this confidential.”

“Sure thing,” he promises, wondering what will happen to him if he doesn't. He drops the coin in his pocket.

Back at the party everyone is dancing to the very dance-able sounds of the Three S&M Graces.

“Where you been?” shouts Palmer. “We've raised a shitload of money! These girls are going to turn the art world upside down!”

“And Art will dig it, that's for sure,” says Wakefield.

While the party parties on, Wakefield keeps up a mental conversation with Redbone, thinking of things he should have said. Redbone himself has disappeared again and Wakefield resists, graciously, he hopes, the assaults of Persephone, Mrs. Redbone, and his new stripper friends, who all try to get him to dance. Redbone, his fantasy conversation continues, you're suffering from a mental illness. A very American illness, I must say. Going it alone, making it in the wild, surviving a hostile environment, that's us. The fort was our model and necessity until, let's face it, the genocide of the Native Americans was complete. But even then, the fort mentality and the terror of the outside didn't leave us for long. In the fifties people had backyard bomb shelters, and they expected to be nuked any minute. And after the nukes, what? Eating Spam in the dark for years? Wakefield tries to imagine himself underground after the nuclear war, seated eternally between Mrs. Redbone and Persephone, taking lit cigars from a solicitous Mr. Redbone. He'd rather die in a plane crash. The only good thing about bomb shelters was that they gave teenagers a place to lose their virginity. The best efforts of this country were not spent on bunkers. During the Depression and the Second World War, Americans pulled together and built highways, dams, and bridges. Why then, in the wide-open age of the Internet, do you want to hide, Mr. Redbone? And not just hide, but hoard the wealth of several small nations? A future architectural psychologist will look at your doomsday structure and will find in you a perfect example of millennial psychosis. America has served the world as a place of escape from fortified homelands for three hundred years; why turn the place into an armed camp
now?

Wakefield wishes he'd made these arguments to Redbone, but somehow he can't even convince himself. Why does Redbone's vision of the threatened “Homeland” disturb him so? He believes, or thought he did, that humanity lives in an uprooted, deracinated, global, nomadic, and permanently exiled state now that we've traded the territorial idea of “homeland” for the freedom of living peacefully nowhere. In cyberspace, or hyperspace. But Redbone has put a major dent in his recently acquired feelings of well-being, joy, and spiritual satisfaction. Damn.

PART FIVE

HOME

Zamyatin is waiting for him outside baggage claim, leaning against his taxi like a bearded bush. There is no sign of the Devil.

“Back just in time for the Library Convention, my friend. Fifty thousand librarians with bodies on fire under their boring librarian clothes for a whole week! Can you imagine?”

Wakefield throws his bags in the backseat. He's home; the air is as thick as soup, saturated with humidity.

“When I was a kid I got under tables in the caféteria and looked up ladies' skirts. When they chased me away, I went to the library. Ah, Soviet librarians! Severe creatures filled with horniness!”

“I brought you something, Zamyat.” Wakefield fishes the tiny salt spoon out of his pocket. “I stole it from the salt bowl at a Polish restaurant where I dined on cabbage with three beauties. Jealous?”

“Salt! You collected the beauties' salt right at the table? There is a library in St. Petersburg made of salt, it blinds you when you see it on a sunny day. It's the Borges library, it's infinite. Or maybe that's the
bibliothèque
on Captain Nemo's submarine. There is a salty, red-haired beauty standing by each shelf, reading over the top of her glasses.”

Wakefield indulges Zamyatin's excessive verbal fantasy; it's how the Russian expresses his happiness. Wakefield loves libraries, and has forever inscribed in his memory a schoolgirl masturbating quietly in government documents.

“The library is the eminent symbol for opposing barbarity,” Zamyatin goes on, as he does (Wakefield calls him Volga sometimes for his speech-
fleuve
), “it is synonymous with civilization. Great libraries are the secular equivalent of the great cathedrals. Public libraries are sanctuaries for the homeless. Think about it, the librarians are like nuns, I bet they can't wait to get to work in the morning, to wash and feed the crazies.…”

Wakefield has his doubts. “You'll have to ask the librarians, but take me home first so I can shower. I feel like the grunge of the nation is on me. Anyway, I don't think that Andrew Carnegie had the homeless in mind when he endowed public libraries.”

“It makes no difference what imperialists like Carnegie think. We are going to have a drink at the window, then you can retake possession of your cave. There are a lot of things that we should discuss, and not a single one of them is important. Actually, nothing big has happened while you were gone.”

That's how Wakefield likes it. Home should be immutable, unchanged. Let the big things happen elsewhere, not in my fun-loving town. Zamyatin actually has an apartment Wakefield has never been to, but he knows it's in one of those buildings next to the freeway, halfway to the airport, where people who are never at home live.

“Do you ever take the ‘bartenderess' to your place, Ivan?”

“Are you joking? I take her everywhere. In the taxi, behind the bar, once at the library. I take her any place. Right where you are I have taken her.”

Wakefield fidgets. Didn't need to know that.

“You know what this taxi is? This taxi is a library, my friend, the greatest library in the city! Whole books come in here. I had a church guy the other day who tells me he fell in love with a Ukrainian girl at a mission in Kiev. He divorced his wife, brought the Ukrainian beauty to America, she runs away from him, and he follows. Now he chases her everywhere. She is a high-class prostitute, I know her. She takes my cab. The whole time this guy is telling me the story, I'm thinking, I know her, small world. It's like a book, for sure.”

“Maybe I should drive a taxi, too. I think I'm done flying!”

“That would be great, Wakefield. You could be the only native-born taxi driver in the whole city. Join the Russians, Pakistanis, Haitians, Palestinians, and Mexicans. You could be an ethnic group of one, you could read your fares instead of books, and the stuff you'd hear! I'm like a priest and this is the church.”

Wakefield can't believe how happy he feels to be back in Ivan's company.

“On the other hand,” Zamyatin laughs, “foreigners are loud, freaky loud. When three Russians are together the noise is impossible. Five Russians, you can't even hear a police siren. You stay away from fellow cabbies, you'll be fine in taxi-library, Comrade.”

These are the days of full employment in America. The huddled masses drive yellow taxis. The taxis are libraries. Their drivers are poets.

“This is great country!” the Russian exults. “In other countries every man has to have his own books, he only goes to the library for the librarians, not the books. One day, I drive a Mexican couple from Oaxaca. The man says he lives in a house of books, because he has to own every book he needs for research, he can't get books outside Mexico City, no interlibrary loan, no computers. His wife, very beautiful woman with eyes like black diamonds and black, black hair, says to me, Zamyatin, you love books, move in with us in Oaxaca, we have thousands of books and many pets, and sexy sculptures made by our artist friends. They live in mysterious mountains, the home of Mayan gods, and she smiles all the time. The husband laughs, and they are both like seventy years old. And then you know what she says?”

“I'm sure you'll tell me.” Wakefield is envious. Sounds like heaven; he'd move in with the Mexican couple himself.

“She says, the thing you will like is we have all the Russian poets in the Russian language in our house and we read them all the time because they are like Mexican painting, close to majesty of death. If you live with us, you can read Russian poets to us in your language and we listen and die happy! Can you believe it?”

Not really, but there is no telling. Wakefield doesn't like to think about death, which is why he keeps away from Russian poetry, though all poetry does tread close to death, either in slippers or in boots. What he fears is that death will not be comforting like poetry, but painful and hissy like a steam vent, agonizing and slow like a wire tightening around his neck. No, he would rather be an old man, forgotten by death—pursuant to the successful conclusion of his pact with the Devil—working on the top floor of an old library, in an office with a window that looks out on a melancholy, autumnal square. He knows the place: in the square there's a statue of George Washington holding a scroll. From the bottom of the hill, the scroll looks comically like an erect penis, and fathers bring their sons there and say proudly, “See? This is why they call him the Father of our Country!” The square is covered with fallen leaves, and pigeons sit on George Washington's scroll. He will look out the window of his corner office at the square, watching the leaves swirl. He will read. Seasons will pass. There is no hurry.

Zamyatin is still talking. “Computers are dangerous to the imagination. The blinking screen will never replace the book, no matter how much memory your machine has. Books are erotic, they mix public and private, expand both inner and outer life. You know those lions at the Public Library in New York? I met a girl there once, like in all the movies. We go inside, my cock is up to here.” He takes his hand off the wheel to make a gesture halfway up his chest. “Think about it! This convention is filled with the daughters and mothers of all the books! I can't stand it. I'm biblio-aroused!”

Librarians! His daughter, Margot, finished her degree in library science last year. She's probably here with the rest of them. He feels guilty, but he doesn't really want to see Margot right now, or rather, he doesn't want to
hear
Margot. He would like to see her face, though, see if she's happy. Before graduate school, she smoked like an existentialist, danced like a demon, and looked like a hippie. She paused only now and then to yell into her cell phone at her absent father. Wakefield had a hard time with her in those days, and started calling her a Digital Hippie, a generation-gap insult.

Ivan parks the cab in front of the bar. Wakefield relaxes. The bartendress is not at her post; the Irish boy who tends bar before her is still on his shift, and he likes Wakefield.

“Hey, Mr. Wakefield. Welcome home. An Irish coffee? I know what
you
want, taxi man. She won't be in for an hour.”

There are only a few customers, so the boy pours himself a Guinness and sits down with them. Wakefield feels cozy.

“It's good to be home,” he admits.

The barman laughs. “I haven't been home in six years. I miss good old Belfast.”

“Home is weird, though. I mean, I live in a place where most people are tourists walking around with guidebooks, and they never seem to know where they are,” Wakefield says truthfully.

“Yeah, but you know where you are, right?”

“Maybe.” He's been thinking about writing an imaginary guidebook to the city. He'd make up restaurants, hotels, cafés, history, and the tourists would never know they weren't real. He feels like he's just been a tourist himself, roaming around with an imaginary guidebook. Then he remembers Maggie and Susan, Sandina and Redbone. He hasn't been on vacation, exactly.

“It must be great to travel,” the Irish boy says. “I'm stuck behind the bar. One of these days I have to go home to see my mum.”

Zamyatin is watching baseball, the Tigers are mauling the Twins on TV. He loves baseball.

“Even after all this time, you still think baseball is American democracy and the other way around, don't you?” Wakefield winks at the Irish boy.

“Baseball relaxes me,” Ivan explains, never taking his eyes off the pitcher. “It's pleasure, not politics. You should say a prayer of thanks that the crowd calls only for hits, not blood. That is the difference between crowd and mob. Any crowd can become mob, but this game of baseball stands between, not letting it happen. Look at soccer, crowds go mob all the time, and kill each other, make riots.”

The only traveling Zamyatin does anymore is to ballparks; old, intimate ones like Wrigley Field, and newer ones like the Astrodome in Houston, and he always comes back happy. Stadiums define cities, he often claims, more than the teams do: “Baseball players are traded and sold and have no problem playing for their old enemies, and that's great. The stadium is a community, the people eat hot dogs and drink beer and love their team no matter where the pitcher is from.”