The Oblivion Arms
Part One
Overture: Frontispiece
Among the names that fill the last guest ledger of the Oblivion Arms -- that hotel called "the Diamond of Penumbra" -- we find, linked by ampersand, the accomplished couple of Murray and Phoebe Tickle Adipose. The hand resembles neither's, and the desk clerk immediately falls under suspicion. We might rebuke this not-uncommon gaffe of hospitality professionals, who atimes forsake guest privacy in pursuit of some obscure industry prestige, had we not pity for the unemployed; for the Oblivion Arms exists no longer. And truth to tell, it's not like this pair hated publicity. Murray Adipose was the grandson of Armando Adipose, né Adiposa, chief architect of the Arms and, among other projects, the short-lived Penumbra Air-Port; Phoebe T. was descended from none other than the great Penumbra developer Eli Phineas Tickle, and during her residence at the Oblivion Arms she managed to broadcast her pride in the name while distancing herself from the recent scandals plaguing Eli P. Tickle Constructions. Alas: now we must put the book back in its plastic bag; it is falling to little bits.
Murray and Phoebe were supposedly hard at work on the follow-up to their Broadway smash "Burton!," a musical loosely adapted from Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy." The production efficiently boiled down the 17th-century quasimedical treatise into a sleek two-hour, three-act entertainment, concluding with a suave Burton dispensing a cure for jealousy to a fellow Oxonian don. The don drinks the vial dry and promptly blows up, spraying the first ten rows with red dye that disappears by show's end. The crowd goes wild; like the blurb says, "A bloody good time!"
The reviews ranged from good to ecstatic. Even the most jaded critics liked the red dye. The seats were still filled three years later, when Team Adipose -- Murray, music and Phoebe, words -- holed up in the Oblivion Arms.
Taking the role of Bobby -- the young Burton -- in the original company was none other than Khâder Adipose, their adopted nine-year-old son, who was from India but looked as white, as it were, as Murray or Phoebe. His skin did not tan; his eyes were a piercing emeraldine. He was overweight but carried it well. The "immensely precocious" (New York Times) Khâder left the production after a year, took a playwriting workshop, where the adage was "write what you know"; and eventually created and starred in an Off-Broadway one-act, "Melancholy Baby" -- all about the experience of acting in a parentally written blockbuster. Then he won a full ride at prestigious Iliac Academy, a school for young actors in Fistula-on-Ane, located just north of Penumbra, Vermont. Khâder had said nothing about his school plans to Murray and Phoebe, who'd been nothing less than supportive when he announced his intention to quit Burton! and something close to filicidal when they discovered what his "Melancholy Baby" was all about.
In the words of the latter production,
When you're young
The world moves fast;
The present's pleasant
And the past is past.
Khâder applied to Iliac on 2 August and was accepted ten days later. He left New York on the morning of 13 August, a Friday, at dawn.
"Melancholy Baby" did not close, however; Sugar Remo, British-born child actress and soap opera vet, filled in, with a minimum of script changes. Never mind that she was a decrepit fourteen. Now the "Baby" began its mutation into fiction, since of course Sugar had never acted in "Burton!," never known the existential crappiness of adoption, ditto that of enforced transnationalism, never had to guard herself against fiercely showbiz parents (her showbiz 'rentals had divorced early on and thus Sugar only had to guard against her mum). With the addition, a year later, of an elaborate animated spaceship sequence, it was clear to critics and fans that "Melancholy Baby" was more fantasia than confessional. Recreational drug users embraced the stimuli; the relentless light show was contraindicated for epileptics. Murray and Phoebe, who nearly had been coming to blows from the stress of working -- which combat would have worked to expansive Phoebe's advantage -- decided now would be a good time to kiss and makeup with each other and with the once traitorous son. They headed to Penumbra -- the ancestral seat -- to find him. They would install themselves in the Oblivion Arms, feed off the Khâder vibes, and compose their next succès fou.
This was in February, two-and-a-half years after Khâder had left "Burton!" and about six months since he'd come to Iliac. The only problem was, he wasn't there.
Act One: The First Partition
Murray came upon his wife in the nook, absorbed in her delectus. A blank legal pad, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter were arranged about a mug of hot coffee, carefully, as though in preparation for some obscure pagan rite. The Penumbra Sun & Organ, still with its crisp fold, lay on one of the wicker chairs. He walked over and picked it up and sat down. He was on the verge of wishing her a good morning but waited too long. Phoebe didn't say anything either -- didn't even look up. It was a big table. It was a big hotel. The musical was a wreck.
He got up and prepared a cup of green tea and came back to the table.
The Sun & Organ had a surprisingly good crossword puzzle, an unsyndicated recombination of pop arcana and half-remembered literatures and local mayoral trivia. Phoebe's forebears often made appearances, and Grandpa Adipose's ill-fated airport had surfaced a number of times -- usually in the vicinity of twelve across, always unfavorably. He had died before Murray was born.
Murray did about a quarter of the puzzle and then put it down, a scattering of fruitless right angles. The tea was bleeding slowly out of the bag and five minutes later the sluggish tail still had not quite lost itself in the water. The phone rang.
"Hi Murray, it's Luis here, calling you from a Gnomon TruTone wireless phone."
"Hi, Luis."
Luis was their agent, who sometimes went by the name Angel. He received savings on his wireless-phone bill in exchange for delivering a short spiel for the TruTone service at the beginning of each call. This now done, he proceeded to unload the usual deadline blather -- the producers had been on his "arse," investors were balking, that sort of thing.
"I can't take any more of this shite," he said. TruTone was a London-based company, Murray remembered; hence the requisite Briticisms. "You're like way overdue, mates."
Then Luis asked for Phoebe. Murray passed the phone. She didn't extend a hand or acknowledge her husband in any way. He put the phone on the table and walked to the bedroom. She doodled while Luis spoke, a bird that bore a passing resemblance to her son.
The working title of the musical was "Burton Jr." It was about Burton's son's adventures in America, and it was all Luis's idea. He'd thought of it after Khâder left the cast, as a way of getting him back. Phoebe thought it would be cathartic, especially after their son went AWOL. Murray was the one who'd pointed out that Burton was a lifelong bachelor.
"Bollocks," said Luis.
"It's true," said Murray.
"Your problem is you're negative," said Luis.
Now Murray was standing by the baby grand, parts of him caught in its black shine. His right hand hesitated above the keys. His left hand rested on the top. He made two fingers into a little running man, all legs, and it jumped over the hurdles of the sharp keys soundlessly. He couldn't bring himself to strike a note.
He shut the piano and went to take a nap.
"All my dialogue is ending with shut up. A says something to B, B says something witty back, B tells A to shut up." Phoebe moved the pack of cigarettes from hand to hand, crushing it nervously. It was almost time for dinner.
"The characters names' are A and B?"
"Ha ha."
"I liked it better when you smoked," said Murray, filling in a particularly fruitful row of crossword. At last, the low-level banter. It would restore him. "You were less tense somehow."
"Shut up," she said. "See?"
"Smoking is good for you, B. Please have someone say that in Act One."
Since settling in the Oblivion Arms, Phoebe blamed their son's disappearance on various parental failures, on vices like smoking. Coffee was next, Murray was sure.
"But Khâder smoked," Murray reminded her. "He was a chimney."
She shook her head, in disgust or sadness; possibly, in both. She went over to the sideboard. Outside, far off, they were building something. A crane lifted a bin full of what she'd call girders except they were likely too small. Whatever they were, they weren't properly distributed, and it looked like the bin would overturn.
"He also drank sometimes," Murray said, not knowing why he was being difficult. "Like, every day."
"So that makes it okay. So that makes us not a bad influence, somehow."
"We, the parents, smoked less than a pack a day between us. This was at our depraved height. Khâder was going on three per." Sometimes Murray felt overly self-conscious when he spoke to his wife, aware of the possibility that she would put his words in some character's mouth. It made him speak in complete sentences.
"He was trying to impress us. He needed attention." Outside, from far off, came a serious-sounding crash.
"He had attention," said Murray. "He had too much attention."
"But not our attention. So he smoked."
"And overate. This is where you tell me to shut up."
Sirens filled the air.
Later that night, his wife asleep, Murray tumbled out of bed -- he'd closed his eyes but hadn't really slept -- and shuffled into the glorified, French-windowed alcove he called the TV room. He rubbed his stubble with the back of his hand.
"I mean, Jesus, it better be the TV room," he was muttering. Maybe this could be a scene in "Burton Jr.," the loquacious father speaking to his offspring. "I mean, it's not the couch room. It's not the window room. You are here for one purpose, and one purpose only: to be glued to the tube till your eyes fall out, heh."
He activated the set and stared at the screen for three hours, letting the waves of light, the many moods, crash about him. An observer across the street, looking up from the sidewalk, would be able to detect the blue light aflicker behind the curtains, and if those hypothetical eyes could take in a multitude of windows at once, behind which other nocturnal Oblivionites televiewed, it might be possible, from that remove -- by registering the sudden flares, the low rumbles of shadows, that simultaneously reflected off several ceilings -- to make notes toward insomnia's lingua franca. What sort of rhythms do we turn to? But Penumbra was desolate at that hour, and the only voyeurs around were onscreen: military men gone wrong, using binoculars to peep at a svelte commando disrobing, in a movie ostensibly about the Third Reich.
Phoebe had always had a "thing" against TV. Murray didn't see the harm but she called it the enemy. "They have things like The Hamburger Channel," she said, by way of argument.
The counterargument being: "And?" Murray had never found that station before, but tonight he did. A stout lady with a helmet of weak blond hair was chopping a scallion and indicating with her hand a baseball-size portion of raw ground beef. It looked good. The beef was shown in close-up and another set of hands took it away. There was a reversion to the wide camera and that was when he thought he saw Khâder Adipose, his adopted Indian runaway actor son, grasping the burger-to-be.
The alleged Khâder receded behind a credenza as the woman was putting the finishing touches on the Cajun Bacon Burger, prepared earlier in the show and now a thing of heat and spices.
My eyes, Murray thought, are playing tricks on me.
Khâder's hands put the other, the scallion, burger in the oven and set the timer.
The credits began to roll but his name wasn't noted. The woman's name was Marigold Wallop, probably a stage name. There was the wheeze of accordion music and eventually the screen went still, the show over, just stock footage of a burger nested with ripple fries and pickle, the whole thing half photo and half pastel. There was a listing of shows later that day, beginning at six a.m. It was only three.
What now? thought Murray.
Burgers, perhaps. He was hungry again. There was no ground beef in the fridge -- there was little of anything there that wasn't prepared by other hands and left over -- and so he called the all-night supermarket. But by the time it was delivered Murray was asleep, curled up, a forlorn ball of meat and bone.
Part Two
Iliac Academy, nestled in the willfully feudal hamlet of Fistula-on-Ane, had heard about Khâder Adipose, certainly, star of "Burton!" and "Melancholy Baby," and had indeed mailed him application materials, care of Murray and Phoebe, at their request; he had been accepted instantly, and his arrival was greeted, literally, with applause and klaxons. He was the kind of student who added luster to Iliac. This woman, a kindly sort, remembered a mildly obese boy with a deep voice and a determined expression. But nobody knew where he was.
"He's just gone?" said Phoebe.
"Let her finish," suggested Murray.
"I'm finished," said the woman. "That's all I know."
"Ah," said Murray.
The phone rang. She answered it. She hung up. Her mouth became a strict gray worm. "Actually, maybe I'm thinking of someone else. Because I don't remember an Indian lad."
"He was light-skinned," said Murray.
"Is," corrected Phoebe.
The secretary shook her head. "No, I think I'm thinking of someone else."
The parents insisted they had neither requested said material nor seen any of it, that the first they knew of Iliac with regard to their son was when said child mailed them a postcard, which they at that point produced. On the face was a bland aquarelle rendering of the Menander Building, which housed most of the classrooms and studios, and the Raunst & Tickle Auditorium, recently erected. Phoebe was quietly, strenuously delighted. Murray, for his part, tried to think if old Armando Adiposa had anything to do with the campus's design. It was a beautiful place, so probably not.
The message on the reverse, in Khâder's impeccable hand, briefly explained the conditions of his scholarship, and expressed his desire that they not try to contact him for the duration of his high school education.
"Harsh," said Murray. He had already resigned himself to the fact that Phoebe was probably not going to quote him in any scenes she might write today.
The secretary ushered the Adiposes into the principal's office, an agreeably dark room that seemed carved out of a mammoth block of cherrywood. The principal, Ricer Carr, wore a loose suit, his shirt the color of sherry, his tie the color of slate. Looking at him, Murray felt pleasantly drowsy.
"Mr. Adipose," he said, "and Ms. Tickle Adipose -- delighted! Welcome back to the land of the Tickles, as they say!"
"Ah," said Phoebe -- delighted, too, against her will.
"I'm afraid there's not much to be said. Your son has been MIA these past however many months. He exists on no record we have."
"Could we see his--" began Murray or Phoebe.
"File? There is no file to open. We can't say what's up with that and the only consolation or piece of information I can give you, take it or leave it, is that one of our most esteemed teachers, one of our groundbreaking instructors, this being his last year, is going ahead with his immersion technique, which is when the student is plunged fully -- 'immersed,' if you will -- in the milieu that the character in question supposedly inhabits. It's not method acting, it's different, let's make sure we understand that! In Khâder's case, he's taken the role of the youngest Punjabi POW ever to survive the Vietcong. It's based on a true story, I think. If not, it should be!"
Ricer Carr laughed. Murray couldn't help but chuckle. Phoebe shot him a glance.
"It's called T"he Youngest Ever." In keeping with the techniques offered by this veteran groundbreaker's guidelines I can offer no reassurances, really. The interior world of the actor has become externalized somewhat, do you see what I mean, and his isolation must remain uncompromised."
"Tell us where he is."
"My other option is to be unfriendly, look you in the eye, and say, Khâder Adipose? Who the aitch, who the eff, is Khâder Adipose? Never heard of the guy in my life. Let's have some coffee."
"No coffee," said Murray. "Our son, who we believe to be on the Iliac campus, was led off the true path thanks to his parents' consumption of certain items."
"I'll have some coffee, thanks," said Phoebe. Murray's jaw dropped in shock.
"Anything in it?" said Ricer Carr.
"I like it the way I like my men: black."
Murray's jaw dropped even lower. Then he realized it was a line plucked from "The Half-Life of Patience," her first produced play -- a one-act from before they met. It had run for a weekend in New Haven. Patience was a black maid who suffers from a Tourette's-like disease, linked to plutonium poisoning, that at least in theory makes her jokes funnier. Except it turns out to be a terminal illness.
Ricer Carr, who was black, had somehow missed "The Half-Life of Patience." He raised an eyebrow.
"That's a play she wrote," explained Murray.
"We'll sue," said Phoebe, back on the offensive. "We will close you down, brother."
"I second that emotion," said Murray.
"Sue?" said Ricer Carr. "'Sioux' is an Indian tribe."
"I'm warning you."
"Don't be silly."
"You're the one being silly," Phoebe said. "Now where is our son? Before we call the police."
"'Police' don't! And I'll have you know I'm perfectly within my rights to act the way I'm acting," said Carr. He spun a fountain pen on the glossy desktop. "Your son has either been slated to play this youngest POW character for a major, major motion picture entitled "The Youngest Ever," about the youngest Punjabi POW in 'Nam. Or else he's doing something even more secret. Or he never came here, he's dead, you're both insane and you forged that postcard. Either you will be extraordinarily proud, prouder than you already doubtless are, or else you will hang your head in sorrow and shame. These are the facts, madame."
Murray wanted to stand up, pound the desk of Ricer Carr, and spit out passionately, "Sir! I demand satisfaction!" the way Gluteus Maximus does to Seneca in one of "Burton!'s" many historical sequences. But something about Ricer Carr -- his bizarre jokiness, his wardrobe -- took the fight out of Murray. He sighed. "Maybe it's for the best."
"Murray, I swear to God," said Phoebe. She tapped the desk of Ricer Carr with a surprisingly thin forefinger and, wittingly or not, echoed a line from her monologue "Swing Batter Batter Swing." "You have not heard the last of me."
The secretary brought in coffee but the self-plagiarizers were already out the door.
On the way back from Iliac, Murray drove and Phoebe developed the crossword. The first name of Murray's grandfather, ARMANDO, appeared vertically. A little chill ran through her with the writing of each letter, as though she was witness to a ghostly manifestation. The answer began one horizontal (ARID) and terminated another (BOLERO), and was impaled at the center by a distorted maxim she wasn't sure was right. Every so often Murray would spot something out the window and gaze.
"Cows," said Murray. "Thirteen, make that fourteen cows."
"You're going to get us killed," said Phoebe, printing TICKLISH in a tentative hand.
"Cows are sacred in India," said Murray. Vermont could still surprise him with its unrelenting green. It made him sort of nauseous.
Back in the Arms, Phoebe fixed herself a sandwich. Murray deftly switched on and muted the TV. On The Hamburger Channel they were showing several ways of storing ground beef. He had forgotten about seeing Khâder on the tube last night -- it seemed like a dream -- and didn't know how to explain it to Phoebe. They recommended a number of different bags and a handheld device that sucked out all the air. It looked like a stapler.
The next day brought a series of telegrams from Khâder. Their son had discovered, to his eternal mortification, that they had visited. He was quite cross--hadn't he insisted that they not meddle? DO I HAVE TO SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU STOP. It was clear that they didn't take him seriously; one more act of aggression and he would sue them, for career sabotage -- he had friends who'd done so, successfully, versus their forebears, natural or adoptive, divorced or together. He was sending this missive through a third office, all the way in Indiana, which would strip every trace of his location.
"So he could be anywhere," said Phoebe. "He could be in Vietnam, or -- Canada."
"He could be in Penumbra," said Murray, looking at the ceiling. "He could be in the Oblivion Arms."
"This is voodoo working," said Phoebe, her fingertips gray from the telegram carbon, her chin - -the second one, alas--beginning to quiver. "Career sabotage'? He wouldn't have a career without us."
"He wouldn't be here without us," elaborated Murray. Phoebe cast around for pen and paper. "He'd be in India, in an orphanage, eating garbage and bathing in public."
"I am writing to that demented Ricer Carr," she said. "Anything you want to say?"
Murray shook his head.
Time passed. A false bird uttered the hour, two trochees, and retreated. Phoebe had yet to write anything and Murray was itching to visit the TV room. It was five to two, and there was a special on bricklaying that had sounded sort of good.
"I was thinking," said Murray. "Maybe Khâder would have been an actor anyway, back in India. In a traveling troupe. They would ramble along on elephant-back and perform in town squares and if they were good they would get food and lodging."
Phoebe made preliminary scratches with the pen, which was near dry. "What about the elephants?" she said.
"They just stay outside."
She threw away the pen, destroyed the paper. Murray fished things out of the refrigerator. They ate in silence. Afterward, Phoebe stepped out -- for some fresh air, she said, in a tone that did not exactly encourage Murray to join her. She made it as far as the lobby, where her eye caught a dim corridor with a stately door at the end. She went to investigate.
Meanwhile, Murray sat what his younger, more raucous self -- the Murray who shook up a moribund opera scene with his scandalous, three-and-a-half-hour "tone poem," "Dementia Americana" -- would have called his skinny white ass in front of the television, bringing with him the day's mail. His fingers worked the letter-opener as the set quivered to brilliant life. The mail bore the usual renditions of his name. Mr. and Mrs. Animus. Dear Mr. Autobus, Imagine that you had a machine that could fold all your letters for you -- freeing up your hours for the things you want to do. Mr. Murray Oedipus. Nothing worth mentioning, save a letter from a monk over at Lopsa Logosh Monastery in New Anhedonia. This monk, Ananda Nada, was of the mind that Murray and Phoebe's son was more likely than not the seventeenth reincarnation of the great blind lama, Karada Naga. He was not a betting monk but if he were he would place it all on Khâder Adipose.
You see, the Iliac Academy chaplain, a friend of Ananda's, had told him of an extraordinary student, Khâder, who had "the Knack" -- some ineffable soul-quality, some perpetual state of complete performance that went beyond mere acting, that transcended the definition of talent and was something else: being, quite possibly. Ananda rarely left the monastery, but would be in Penumbra for a conference, and wondered if it might be possible to pay a visit to the parents of this rare and beneficent creature.
"And the Buddha said, 'How shall I litigate versus the parental units?'" intoned Murray. "And, not discerning an answer, he betook himself into the woods beyond the mountain and played a Punjabi POW for a straight-to-cable movie while agents renegotiated his contract."
"Co-Ed Bodyshaping" was on. He found it had a soothing effect, making him less startled than he might otherwise have been by Andanda's letter. He put it aside, on the coffee table. When he went to fetch some snacks, his knee swiped the letter, causing it to be added to the pile of junk mail, magazines, staff paper, napkins, and other scraps that were already massing on the floor, soon to rise and form a blanket about him.
Part Three
Act Two: The Second Partition
In truth, the library of the Oblivion Arms had never been particularly well frequented, but it had probably been a little cleaner in past times. It had also been bigger; neglect had made it a candidate for reduction, when the lobby was restructured to accommodate a larger elevator. Now it was more or less triangular, with only one window, high and useless. In this abbreviated volume, books had been stacked like cordwood on shelves, desks, and tables, and several boxes piled in the closet promised more.
It was hot; the radiator was controlled by higher powers, and the window, even if reachable, had been weatherproofed shut years ago. Phoebe took off her coat and dusted what surfaces she could with her handkerchief. She cleared off the largest table, putting the materials -- wide map-albums, thick social registers bound in alligator -- on the floor in ordered stacks, then (after realizing that whoever was using them was long gone, or even dead) willy-nilly. Flame-shaped electric bulbs, set in a cast-iron chandelier, draped a weak orange glow over the room, and deep shadows were everywhere, though it was only midafternoon. She found and lit a number of candles, each as thick as her arm. She tried not to sweat, but she was still not used to being so heavy, and it was hard.
Still, Phoebe felt inspired. The library would be her office. Since coming to Penumbra Murray had exerted a negative energy field on her; even if she managed a spot of writing at breakfast, his entrance would throw her off the scent, and the rest of the day was pretty much a wash. It wasn't anything he was doing -- in fact, maybe it was something he wasn't doing. His outrage at Khâder's absence, for example, seemed way too tepid to her. A word from a jokester like Ricer Carr could quiet him down.
She wanted to take her present turmoil and use it -- let it leak into the work at hand. ("Write it in blood," as her mentor, the suicidal Indonesian poet Vakabun, once told her. "And once you are finished writing -- write it again.") Maybe Murray wasn't to blame. Maybe it was a failing in herself -- a lack of courage that had as much to do with the success of "Burton!" as with Khâder's absence. It wasn't the money... and yet it was. Should "Burton Jr." fail to match its predecessor's figures, they would be pegged as having begun their downhill slide.
And perhaps they needed box-office success for more practical reasons -- like, oh, money. Luis had structured an ornate deal for "Burton!" that, he claimed, was making them a mint, but since he was also the manager and accountant for Team Adipose, and was not as clear with how the decimal point works as he pretended, they never had a strong sense of how much was really ever there. He kept telling them not to worry. They charged everything onto credit cards that gave them frequent-flyer miles and long-distance discounts, and soon it became unclear whether they were spending in order to fly, or flying in order to call, or calling in order, somehow, to spend.
They had a quick dinner together and then retreated to their separate solitudes. Phoebe brought a stack of legal pads and a quiver of pencils. She also dug out of a drawer the cellular phone that had fallen into disuse since their Vermont transposition; she thought about the dramaturgical chestnut of the gun present in the first act going off in the third. Murray walked over to the piano but dashed into the TV room as soon as he heard the front door click behind his wife.
The television was new, but the casing was vintage. Sound issued from the gold-meshed naughts in the wood facade that was crafted, like the flourishes decorating a dollar bill, to a vegetative complexity. It was like watching a little cathedral.
Khâder was everywhere that night. Murray saw what looked like Khâder in the audience of a game show, the one where you phrase your answer in the form of a limerick. A Khâder-esque hoot of joy was distinctly heard in an ad for insect-shaped aspirin for kids. And was that his son, listlessly pitching pennies with other dead-end kids in "Howard & Sonia," a sitcom about a horror writer's doomed marriage in 1920s Brooklyn? Murray had the concierge bring up some blank tapes, with the intention of recording Khâder's appearances, but he never even loaded the VCR. The only muscle working was the one in his thumb, commanding the remote.
There were more stations than he'd imagined, even allowing for the limits a near-fogey expects. The Hamburger Channel was in the low 70s; the blue numbers at the corner of the screen continued to rise as he depressed the remote's soft rubber arrow, and his thumb actually cramped when he attempted to push the digits through the ceiling -- to exhaust the gamut and reemerge, as from bewitched slumber, on the terra firma of single digits, the stodgy networks of his own childhood.
He felt feverish, the way he did when composing -- remember composing? -- and in a split second (that, alas, takes a paragraph to unfold), he smoked out the connection. When he was young and hungry in New York, "summering" with moneyless friends in dicey neighborhoods far uptown, he would walk with no destination, higher and higher, for this is how a rhythm best weds itself to a body. The street numbers rose, and up to a certain point might pass for readings off the actual thermometer. But soon enough the figures were too high, Venusian. Still he trudged on. Evening would fall like a brick wrapped in foil, and he would drag himself home through the half-remembered streets, exhausted but with a song in tow.
The TV had a rhythm, too, channel after channel, a pattern to the color and sound. He found he could keep going up. The sequence wouldn't quit. He neared, then exceeded, 300, and though some of the stops along the way were given to ghostly raster, most featured something to snag the eye: bowling, wildlife, exhibitionists, weather maps purple with complexity.
Murray punched in 4-0-0 and was greeted by a set of hands folding paper airplane after paper airplane: Khâder's hands, perhaps. He punched in 4-9-9 and saw a klatsch of yarmulked boys competing at dreidl, razzing each other mercilessly in French and Yiddish. He suddenly dreaded the possibility of channels beyond 500. He watched the dreidl's permutations a full minute. At 666, a goateed man in a badly fitting devil suit peered peevishly at his fingernails. Murray found this funny, then not so funny.
"Front desk."
"Hello, this is Phoebe Tickle Adipose, writer of the hit musical "Burton!," calling from a Gnomon 'Action!' cellular phone. When you want to live the active life, you want Gnomon."
"Hello, madame."
"I was just wondering if you could have Charly in the kitchen fix a little something and send it my way. I'm in the library."
"Very good. Some steak, maybe?"
Phoebe had ordered a dozen steaks from Argentina, packed in dry ice. She was on a diet called Forbidden Fruit: you could eat all the meat and carbs you liked, but no sauces or produce. She would give it a few more weeks. "Splendid. I had dinner a couple hours ago but I'm still hungry. I always get hungry when I'm writing."
"We'll bring one as soon as we can, madame."
On what seemed to be the last of four local archaeology channels, an avuncular but authoritative voice catalogued a recent dig. Colonial artifacts: coins, bottles, string of unknown purpose. A doll with buttons for eyes, bearing an extinct mold that looked like red spinach. Below these, a hasp and a scraper. Murray was about to switch when the leader of the dig, a tall, bearded gentleman from Penumbra College, said something about the old Air-Port, which Murray's grandfather Armando had designed.
"Many more things might have been elevated from this findspot had the runway not been constructed over it," he said, as the camera showed a pickax, then hands shaking dirt through a sieve. The heat from the planes had doubtless destroyed countless items -- "items beyond dollarly measure."
Murray's face flushed with Adiposal resentment.
Paradoxically, the runway traffic had had a beneficial effect, too. It had to do with something something reverse-magnetization. The same heat that destroyed the colonial-era items drew those of more distant vintage closer to the surface. Though carbon dating had not yet been performed, the professor was ninety percent certain they were looking at the earliest manufactures of the Sewidgee tribe. They were an ancient native people who had fled what was now Canada ("Great Northern Waste") untold ages ago. They were dying out -- but perhaps some of their secrets could be solved before it was too late. He looked very satisfied, surrounded by a bevy of attractively ruddy, khaki-shorts-wearing female graduate students, who yelled obscure directives at each other while manipulating sieves. Some of them had twisted their shirts into those bikinilike tops. Some wore coolie hats.
He stomped around the site in his Hawaiian shirt, stopping to comment on various finds.
"I found this javelin sharpener," said one of his dig-haremites. Her arms were streaked with mud but her face was clean and pale. She brushed a russet lock out of her eyes.
"That's great, Kathy," he said, turning it over in his hands. "Let's compare this to the one from last week. I think these markings on the side are regnal dates."
Along with a sizzling steak, the Front Desk of the Oblivion Arms brought a spare banker's lamp into the room -- the smoke from the candles had nowhere to go, making respiration a bit more labor-intensive than she liked. It would be impossible to do her exercises. She had bought a diet book that claimed five minutes of situps a day was all you needed. In Phoebe's mind the wording loosened, and it became five situps a day. Now it was something like five situps every five days, which she nevertheless failed to execute.
While she ate her dessert apple -- a no-no -- she flipped through the withering books around her, absent-mindedly tearing herself apart. Bits of her fell in the texts: hair and soft globules of pore-grease, flakes of skin. She gently employed page corners as fingernail-grime removers. Future readers would come upon her eyelashes and canthi-crumbs and the occasional dislodged snotling. This was a kind of immortality.
What was she looking for? A sandwich of musty dime paperbacks, concealed beneath the radiator, promised some laughs, but she put them aside when she saw her hands rainbowed by the cheap ink. There was a cookbook of South American favorites, with its pages falling out; a map of the area, defaced by crayon; and a picture of her great-aunt Olive.
At least it looked like Olive. Phoebe had known her growing up, till the age of seven; many afternoons, hemmed in with rain, she would sit in Olive's parlor with a lump of modeling clay, or a play typewriter, or a scrap of gingham or finery they would turn into a doll dress by dinner. Tapping a rhythm on the side of a drinking glass, Olive would teach her songs of an earlier girlhood, every line with a disused word demanding explanation. They would look through sepia photos arranged in a simple album of black boards, the corners of the pictures tucked into small diagonal cuts. Between each board was a rose-colored pellicle, like a little cloud behind the opening credits, suddenly gone (turn, with a whisper) as the camera sweeps down on the little town with its little people.
This picture wasn't of Olive, though, but of her kid sister, Olivia. (They had a brother, Phoebe's grandfather Oliver: Olive used to joke that it was if their parents were trying to conjugate some obsolete, exclamatory verb, melded from "O, live!") Dredging one of the closet boxes, Phoebe recovered a portrait of the three Tickles, which made the Olivia/Olive distinction clearer. She had seen this portrait as a child: Olive seated in the middle, dark hair marcelled, thin hands crossed demurely over a knee; Oliver looking exquisitely bored, standing behind her and holding, for some reason, a tennis-racket press without a racket; and Olivia, girlishly tilting her head, a daisy in her hair, still a world away from the handsome if rigid features of the female variety of Tickle. (And three or four worlds away, thought Phoebe grimly, from the equal-opportunity corpulence that affected some of the clan.) But this portrait was different, in that it had words written deeply across it, in a stubbornly neat script. All capitals, an architect's hand.
Now she dug into the emboxed archives with a nameless determination. What exactly was she looking for? She took out bundles of letters in lavender envelopes, rolled architectural draughts, mundane datebooks, and journals written in a foreigner's careful English.
The Sewidgee tribe, if we are to believe the ragged lore, came from another planet, perhaps Saturn; in the 1830s the federal government used this argument against them, claiming they were nonindigenous and therefore illegally in possession of federally marked reservation land. ("Indian givers!" a native-rights gazette of the time charged.) Their territory was winnowed to half its size, then to a third of that, and so on until all that was left were about fifty glum acres, good for nothing but crabapples and, if the footage was to be believed, tire-swings set up in trees.
An old lady shuffled about a trailer home, sweeping every now and then with a sparse broom. Her voiceover was in a language completely unfamiliar to Murray.
"This whole land is cursed," read the subtitle. "The graves were disturbed by man-birds and now the Hand will wither away."
The "man-birds" were airplanes. The "Hand" was a common appellation for Penumbra, which was shaped like one. (The Oblivion Arms being the "Ring" of the Ring Finger, the Air-Port at the same digit's fingernail.) Armando Adiposa, Murray's forebear, had built over sacred ground.
"Hello Murray, it's Luis here, calling you from a Gnomon TruTone wireless phone. Whether your needs are business related or personal, TruTone delivers unlimited fuss-free telephone capability with crystal-clear reception. Just see your nearest Gnomon TruTone representative for details. TruTone -- you won't believe your ears."
"Is it just me or has your TruTone pitch gotten longer?"
There was a silence. "I get crazy discounts, mate."
"I know."
"Um, is Phoebe in?"
"She's in the library," said Murray.
"Are you sure?"
"Pretty sure. Unless she's shacking up with the concierge."
"Was that a joke?" said Luis. "I hope that was a joke."
"It was a joke."
"Phoebe's very special. You should know that."
"Yes, Luis."
"Did she bring her phone?"
"I don't think so."
"I'll call back then."
"It's not something I can help you with?"
"Nada. Just wanted to see how she was holding up."
"Ah."
"Adios, Señor Adiposa."
In 193-, Armando Adiposa quitted his long apprenticeship in Rio, and, instead of returning to his native Spain (for "politics" left him utterly cold), boarded a steamer for New England. Folded in the back of his English primer was a letter of introduction, already yellowing, to a Boston architect who had warmly received Armando's master once in Paris. Armando tried his English on the crew members, most of whom were Chinese; they had marvelous queues of night-black hair, and mouths full of golden teeth, but no language save their own. Mechanical failures overwhelmed the vessel in the vicinity of Cuba, and after a dolorous month of rum and mosquitoes, playing hands of patience amidst the impatiens, Armando abandoned hope that the ship would ever be ready. A small outlay of gold gained him steerage aboard a cargo boat bound for points along the coast as high as Rockport, Maine. The voyage was unpleasant, his new shipmates allergic to his attempts at English. He swung in a clammy hammock under a low ceiling, dealing game after game of ombre, conversing with phantom Americans -- cowboys, pilgrims, inventors. One morning on deck, looking back at a row of thunderheads the ship was furiously trying to outpace, Armando accidentally dropped his lesson-book into the fast-moving sea: his first slip of the tongue. Later he realized he had never taken the letter out.
Intermission
There was a lot to watch that night. There was a special on Do Insects Sleep? There were, separately, specials on the coral snake, the narwhal, the bedbug, the ibex, the Siberian tiger, the narwhal again, the chameleon, a llama-like creature that shat heaps of perfectly round pellets, the tree frog, the stegosaurus, the hantavirus, the Bactrian camel, and the other kind of camel. There was a special on Micronesia, Japan, Turkey, Tierra del Fuego; there was a special on Windsor, Ontario. There was a special on faith healing. There was a special on stand-up comedy, on "dyke" poetry, on Alzheimer's risk groups. There was a special on Civilization and Its Discothèques. There was a special on a friend of John Steinbeck and on euthanasia and on Genghis Khan. There was a special on diet research and on the Ku Klux Klan and on Stanford University. There was a special on three saints: Sebastian, Agnosia, Dymphna. There was a special on technology today. There was a special on Canada. There was a special on the Saragasso Sea and on the Oracle at Delphi. There was a special on Shakespeare and on the common cold. There was a special on Romulus and Remus that posed the question, Did they get enough nutrients? There was a special on Bigfoot and on women who abuse pets. There was an animated special on the unlikely friendship between a duck and a plastic bottle. There was a special on a blind sculptor who turned out not to be blind, and how all the people who had bought his high-end statues now wanted their money back. There was a special on the Indian economy. There was a special on hara-kiri, on Eli P. Tickle Constructions, on the making of an expensive commercial featuring the voices of dead opera singers. There was a special on infidelity, on Lyme tick disease, on a Belgian pacifist movement, on the Caspian Sea. There were fourteen specials on fourteen different pop music phenoms, most of whom were unfamiliar to Murray. There was a special on the history of color television. There was a special on Henry James, on Louis XIV, on the man who wrote "Bridge Over the River Kwai," the battle over his estate. There was a special on the striptease, then and now. There was a special on monsoons and on protecting our children. There was a special on videotaped suicides, and what was the media's responsibility. There was a special on a small community of vegetarians accused of witchcraft -- the allegations, the fear, the lies. There was a special on famous short people, including those one might not think of as short, giving all relevant measurements. There was a special on Bacteria: Friend or Foe? There was a special on the future of Braille. There was a special on the history of pizza, the history of China, the history of domesticated beasts. There was a special on pornography, on the elevator of the future, on incest laws of the American southwest. There was a special on a late comedian's dark side: his struggle with booze, his gambling debts, his secret wish to bring the life of the Marquis de Sade to the screen. There was a special on the gubernatorial race and on obsessive-compulsive disorders and on the decline of margarine use. There was a special on lying. There was a special on mutual funds. There was a special on the history of loneliness.
Part Four
Act Three: The Third Partition: 'Love-Melancholy'
Phoebe rose to take a tour around the room. Her back was giving her problems. It was the weight. She was regretting the apple -- what kind of diet didn't let you eat fruit? She felt like a chump.
Her finger, trailing across the wall, gathered a heap of dust that fell, with a dreamy slowness, to the floor. She found herself looking at a scrap of the underlying wallpaper, most of which had been painted over in a graying white. The paper was patterned with the hotel's emblem: embedded letters, an A within an O, the latter composed of three bolts of lightning, the former a serpent that looped to bite its own tail.
Phoebe stepped back, as if fearing voltage or venom. There was a motto, in Greek, which was simply a transliteration of the English word "Oblivion." The snake's back, or rather the lowest point of its loop, rested on a heap of tiny coins, from which shot a spray of short lines, representing glitter.
Boston held nothing but rain. After some effort he secured a room, or half of one, at the Friends of Brazil Society. His fellow boarder was an old gent who spent his waking hours manipulating tiny screws on a device resembling a typewriter, which he called, somewhat mysteriously his tradutor. Armando thought him addled.
During a deceptively dry portion of the afternoon he set off for the address on the lost letter (he had sensibly memorized it before the voyage) and discovered, to his dismay, that the shingle no longer hung. Three weeks ago, the kindly Brahmin had succumbed to scarlatina. The small firm he headed had broken up almost as rapidly as that letter, sounding the soundless deep, had been turned to nothing by currents and curious fish.
The storm began in earnest. A crestfallen Armando plotted, fantastically, a return to Spain. He would fight valiantly for...ah, he would decide when he got there. Upon entering his room, he found the old man and the translation machine gone -- as well as the gold pieces stupidly left in the not-so-false bottom of his steamer trunk.
What happened next is not abundantly clear, but it might be called the second of Armando's slips of the tongue. The club's secretary claimed no knowledge of the absconder's whereabouts, and soon Armando changed tacks, seeking a loan rather than revenge. At which point the secretary changed tacks, offering a possible address rather than money. Back in Rio, Armando had found his Portuguese leave him during spans of flusterment, forcing him to use Spanish; now the Spanish seemed to have deserted him as well, and all that remained was a sputtering, ludicrous, impressionistic version of English. In the ensuing chaos, involving a cleaning lady, a porter, and a rotating cast of roomers, a pen was procured, an umbrella offered, and various instructions were noted. Whether the old man with Armando's money had actually fled to Penumbra, or whether that town's name was conjured simply by a careless proximity of the words pen and umbrella, it is impossible to say. (Though Armando never found the traitorous tradutor, years later he would design the deliberately drab office building of a Penumbran translation agency called Interlingua.) The secretary bundled Armando into a waiting landau, which whisked him off to the Vermont Institute, across town. Here he ate sandwiches of gray meat and listened to a brief lecture on the history of Penumbra. In the past, Vermont had minted its own money, separate from the national legal tender; and Penumbra still had its own money, separate from Vermont's.
Over potent cocktails, they somehow coaxed his gold from him, exchanging it with a sack of this special currency. Money useless anywhere else. His options thus reduced, he would leave in the morning for Penumbra.
Having closed a business deal, the man dons his hat, collects coat and walking stick from a lackey by the vestibule, and dashes down the steps into a waiting landau. His neat mustache has just a trace of silver and his splendid eyes twinkle in their orbits. The driver spins the wheel and they merge into silver traffic.
Boring! thought Murray Adipose. He had hoped the movie would reveal itself to be a musical, some insouciant song-and-dance spectacle, but no one was even saying anything. Stock music plays as the man disembarks at the train station, the porter derives a suitcase from the trunk, and both porter and driver are tipped, apparently generously. The man, smiling, waves away their effusive thanks. He passes through the first-class car, where he belongs, and takes a seat with the commoners, as if to absorb their secrets for some higher purpose.
One channel up, a coach of some sort was saying, "We're getting poised to really catch fire again."
They traveled by train, on which they were but dimly aware of each other's presences; by pneumatic dinky, on which mild greetings were exchanged; and by private landau, on which a doomed friendship was born.
The name of this man with extraordinary eyes was Eli Phineas Tickle, though the name meant nothing, then, to Armando. By choice, he never traveled first class. He was fifteen years older than Armando, dressed like the dandy he was, and implored the Spaniard to call him "Finn." This request, coupled with a hearty clap on the back, confused Armando, who wondered if his months at sea might have engendered some thin, dorsal growth.
"In China," said Finn, "we were transported by palanquin, in the rainy season. Me and Smitty and our luggage. Now that was living. Seventeen Chinamen to do the trick." He made a poor sketch on the back of the envelope. "It's all to do with psychology, see. They thought it might save their souls -- though until our arrival, they had not even possessed the concept of a 'soul.' In any case the passage was pura seta, you know: smooth as silk."
As a young man Finn had wanted to write books -- novels so thick you could use them as pillows. "The American Tolstoy" was the title he sought. Farmed out to Groton, matriculating at Yale, he quit his undergraduate studies after two years and headed for the Far East, ostensibly for missionary work. But when Finn, drained by fever and intestinal ills, finally reached the new station at Fu Lang Chow, twenty years of inculcation in the Episcopal faith had crumbled away. There he developed a field of studies he liked to call "power relations." Espousing a little bit of socialism and a mix of often contradictory religions, and brandishing the threat of violence, Finn energized a clan of heathens who were loyal to him "to this day." Their exploits were numerous and often extreme. ("About which," he promised, "more later.")
Returning to Penumbra with this knowledge, the redoubtable Finn, looking for a time as tanned as any Hindoo, ascended the ranks of the family business--and the rest, as they say, is history. If anyone asked, "Penumbra" would be, essentially, his great creation.
"And what, dare I query, will you do in our town?" Finn asked, stuffing a pipe.
While Finn had been talking, Armando elaborated on the croquis of the palanquin system. In the background, rising above the bamboo he had penciled in a spectacular palace, so magnificent one forgot it was a thing of lead lines and not of precious metal, of diamonds the size of fists.
"Architect!" cried Finn, upsetting the tobacco. Armando smiled. "Sent by the Institute? Bully, sir -- bully indeed!"
Armando dipped his head modestly, debonairly turned his palms upward. Why did this man think he was a bully?
"Your name again, my good man?"
Armando told him, writing it on the envelope at the same time, as if one or both of them were deaf.
"That won't wash, chum," said Finn, with a concerned frown. He poked the air with the tip of his pipe. "Take the '-a' off the end and we're in business. Change it," he made the emendation, "to an '-e.' You're going to hit the jackpot, my friend; I shall see to it. Come stay at the house tonight. I have some buildings that need building."
Thus Armando Adipose was born, midwifed by commerce.
"And one," snapped the voice, "and two. And three. And take it to the left and take it one."
Eh? thought Murray.
"And two. And three. And once more to the right and take it up. And down."
Figures were bouncing, glorious in Lycra.
Morning had somehow become afternoon. "And left. And right and do it once more to the up. And down. And side. And other side come on let's do it one. And two. And three. And four more to the left and we go up. And down. And side. And side more to the left we up down one."
The phone rang.
"Uh...This is your wife Phoebe calling, with the Gnomon Freedom Afternoon Plan. Gnomon Freedom: 'It ain't just for mornings anymore.'"
"Hi, wife."
"So how are you?"
"I'm okay." He turned down the volume.
"I have the phone with me."
"So I hear. How's the library?"
"I'll tell you all about it later. I think I've got an idea."
"For 'Burton Jr.'?"
"For something."
"We don't have to do it if we don't want. I was thinking, we could do anything."
"We could fall on our faces. Our 'arses.'"
"Right," he said. "But we won't."
"No, we won't."
"Because we're Team Adipose." He clicked the TV off. "I'm actually a little shocked."
"Why?"
"You haven't told me to shut up yet."
"This is a really pleasant call, Murray. I don't want to ruin it now."
"You could never ruin anything, ever."
"Murray?"
"Eh?"
"Shut up, Murray. Go play piano or something."
She hung up. He smiled, counted to ten, and turned the TV back on. Four ponytails leapt as one. The beaty music stopped.
"We'll take a break and when we come back we'll concentrate on what's a problem area for many of us, the glutes."
There is a letter from Armando's former master, written on thick white paper, that Phoebe did not see; it was seen years ago by the town historian, Albertus Overreach, the last person to leave, alive, the library at the Oblivion Arms. He had been working on a chapter about the hotel, but his asthma grew so severe he quit the premises -- and, in due time, his project on the Tickle family fortune.
The letter describes the contents of a crate the master is sending from Australia, where he has retired. Customs officials believe it to hold an aboriginal drum that, when hit with twenty fingers, sounds uncannily like a summer storm. Inside, though, in seven hermetic metal capsules, are the insects Armando requested for his "scient-iffy experiment." Though the master's letter is mostly in English (with charming Antipodeanisms -- "these bushboys are the nicest mates"), insect is rendered in Spanish, the two interior consonants mistakenly transposed: incesta.
The historian Albertus Overreach has, it seems, committed a scholarly sin, circling this word with his own pencil. Now the word is disappearing from the paper. Now the paper is disappearing.
"You are becoming absurd, sir."
The Spaniard's smile maintains integrity, though his eyebrows droop, and inside him all is ruin. In a high, excited voice he states his case -- which his interlocutor does not care to hear.
"You do not 'love' her. You are simply confusing your needs. There is a special establishment I can lead you to, where you will find any proclivity requited. Most, anyway. All at my company's expense."
The Spaniard starts to speak and is cut off. "Think very carefully before you say another word."
The hotel has been built. Its financier and its architect stand on the observation deck, looking across the water at the other fingers of Penumbra. One can tell, looking at their stiffness, their distance, how much has changed. At the ribbon-cutting five months ago, the architect stood next to the industrialist's daughter, close enough to smell her. In the photograph she is smiling, looking at him; a daisy, despite her father's protests, in her hair. Though the architect had fallen in love with her even before meeting her -- in the landau, her father, desperate to find someone for his more marriageable elder daughter, had shown the Spaniard a picture of all three children -- he had waited. He was a gentleman. He had never had a private audience with this youngest daughter; they had played cards, with her siblings ("Straight whist or Boston?"), spun at charity balls, and chatted in the parlor of her father's mansion. He had delighted her with drawings of dream-palazzos and hanging gardens, and once, just once, allowed himself to linger for three fateful seconds in her humid hug: he was summering in Italy, and she had said, "Oh! I wish I might go with you!" And he had said, in Spanish: "Another time."
He says the words now, in front of her father, in English.
"You are drunk," says the wealthy father. That evening, he sits in his study, writing to the headmistress of a boarding school in distant Connecticut. For every line, then word, a tear falls, and he must start the letter afresh. He winds up typing it, on a queer old contraption he finds next to the sewing machine, in one of the rooms given over to junk. He must give his daughter away to save her.
In the morning suitcases clog the vestibule, and by supper she is gone. In the afternoon the Spaniard begins his descent into what we might reasonably call madness.
Armando would spend his last years in the asylum at New Anhedonia, the final building of his to see construction. After losing the generous commissions from Eli P. Tickle and its subsidiaries, Armando was forced to shed his work of the flourishes his benefactors had indulged. With Olivia gone (really gone, for she died of a mouth disease less than a year after leaving Penumbra), Armando had no use for his former conceits, his ideas of Old World ornamentation. In fact, a cluster of apartment buildings in nearby New Yorick was known informally as Glumville, until it was torn down for a parking garage, which today waits to be torn down for nothing at all.
After the ridicule heaped on Armando for the Air-Port, followed swiftly by the Roman Baths fiasco, he began devising architectures that, in truth, could never exist. He proposed, to no one: deliriously high walls made of thousands of glass sheets; a new administration building for the ice factory, made of ice; a church in the shape of a toilet. His sketches became looser, billowy. Buildings resembled humans, or gargoyles, and were transposed, with scissors and glue, onto aquatint postcards of the Penumbran peninsulae. The whole landscape howled with pain.
For they had written to each other, and had "nick-names": she was his "Oblivion," he was her "Arms." He would write her a letter a day, each enfolded in an envelope with her address penned in a feminized hand -- supposed correspondence from a schoolmate who lived "in town." Her letters were less frequent, and shorter; they are hard to read, for being pressed with Armando's lips.
In a journal he notes how easy it was to convince her father into agreeing that "Oblivion Arms" was a good name for a hotel. Armando claimed that a small wood-sprite had whispered the solution to him as he dozed in the forest by Bish-Bosh Falls. Finn, the power relations expert, saw a submerged loucheness to it that would lure guests in before they were quite sure what was going on. (That day Armando had brought his Olivia horehound and sarsasparilla, and a shrunken foot-locker filled with ten gold coins, which she ate with magical speed as he told her of his triumph.)
Olivia's letters kept coming to Armando, from her school in Connecticut. She wrote with a quill, with brown ink she joked was some exquisite river mud. "Straight whist or Boston?" she would postscript. He was forbidden to visit; guards would shoot him dead. Then she died, on a rain-laden day, of a sort of thrush. A disease as light as a bird, whose feathers floated to the ground to form letters, words: a sentence Armando could never bring himself to say.
Phoebe shed tears. She was large enough, she thought wryly, that when she cried she, there is no other word, blubbered. What had happened? Her great-aunt had never grown so big, nor her mother so porcine, nor her sister, a failed caterer in New Brunswick, so profoundly wide. True: her grandmother -- Finn's wife -- was stout at the end, in both senses of the word, and earlier forebears included women of considerable girth. Phoebe felt the chair creak. She felt it might break beneath her, despite its metal reinforcements.
She wasn't sure if she wept for Olivia, Armando, or herself. Later she was sure she was crying for someone named Khâder Adipose.
Part Five
"Communist" was not quite the term, no; nor "anarchist." Books by the key writers of numerous radical schools narrowed Armando's chambers, just as his jottings narrowed the margins of their pages.
He was whatever was against Eli Phineas Tickle -- Finn, who had looked across all Penumbra from a turret of the Oblivion Arms and declared, "This is my complete fiction." Finn, who bowed to no one, who mastered everything save the weather.
The later Adiposal notebooks allude to bombs and guns, plagues and poisons, "accidents" with the intricate improbability of Rube Goldberg contraptions. Armando's writing reverts to Spanish, Latin, Greek, gibberish -- he didn't even know the middle two. In the final stages, his output is mostly a matter of arrows, drawn with red or blue pencil, as if describing minute currents of hot and cold air that swirl at the top of every page.
Despite Finn's wishes, Armando could not legally be evicted from his office at the rear of the Oblivion Arms. He spent most of his time there, working late into the night while the maid dusted around him. Though the opposite of Olivia, she was remotely pretty, an Irishwoman with rosy cheeks and rosier hair who spoke with a vestigial burr.
They were wed in a matter of months. She bore him two sons.
He draws his wife vast cities bearing her name that are nevertheless not as vast as the ones bearing Olivia's -- the conurbations he has left to drown in dust or waves, but whose secret spires continue to press their argument on his dreams.
Calendar pages succumb to wind (someone should close that window), and then the letters start accumulating in his mailbox -- letters from someone who, being dead, theoretically should not be writing letters. He rubs his temples with fingers, as if to massage away this hallucination.
At first he crumples the correspondence, fills his waste-can like a gardener disposing the bulbs of some deadly flower. But the letters keep coming, and the waste-can overflows. (Whoever died of thrush?) How can he not reply?
On The Hamburger Channel they were making something called Burger Kiev. A whole onion bulb, skin intact,was set atop the bun to mimic an ogival dome. On the Homeopathic News Network was a commercial for a very special television event that would be showing on another, corporately connected channel: "A Monk Returns -- The Homecoming of Ananda Nada."
Doubtless our more esteemed entomologists will cavil at the following episode; we offer no "learned" defense, and only maintain that, just as love (per Armando's headstone) can be stronger than death, so too can truth (per Finn's) be stranger than fiction.
For Phoebe Tickle Adipose's burrowing into the failed family romance came at a price. As she trailed a thumbnail across the lines of Armando Adiposa's journal intime and architectural draughts, she would every so often split open a long-dried inkblot, resting like a scab upon the page. Each blot, often formed as an accidental adjunct to a question mark, contained up to two dozen eggs of Coptotermes penumbrus (as we have provisionally dubbed the critter), perfectly preserved -- and ready for action.
The eggs quickly fell to the carpet, and soon hatched; the termites descended through the cheap shag and, after some mandible action, convened in the soft wood below. They seemed to know exactly what to do, despite having awoken from a sleep of decades. In no time, the Oblivion Arms hosted a thriving colony, one whose members were immune to the relative cold of nontropical Vermont -- Vermont in high winter, at that. Blind, ravenous, and perfectly communist, they compromised every plank, jamb, sill, and cabinet; they threaded their trails through the tables and chairs, grout and scallop-shaped soap, and perforated not just the walls but the pictures that hung on the walls. It was as though a reverse Midas were touching everything in sight, some invisible emperor of waste.
The documents Phoebe read, set aside in a loose pile, were already succumbing to the swarm of jaws. Were she to put a hand on the papers -- to refer to an earlier incident -- she would find her fingers sinking in a horror of pulp. The wooden television casing had not yet been conquered. But it was only a matter of time.
Outside it seemed to be morning again. Her little phone was ringing somewhere near her body.
"We forgot about you."
"How could you forget?"
"We're very, very sorry."
"You're saying everybody is outside?"
"Your suite has a different telephone line. We neglected to call. Then we remembered you were in the library."
"Why is everybody outside?" With a stray business-reply card, for a magazine long dead, Phoebe fanned at the sweat that formed in her cleavage.
"I have someone from the police who is going to talk to you."
The sheriff, Pentose Shunt, told her to stay put. To be very still, in fact. Did she have water nearby? She did, a bottle of Naive. Did she have food? Admittedly, yes, a few bags of chips from the lobby machine. And a small jar of olives that had somehow snuck out of her room earlier. And, alas, other foodstuffs. Everything was going to be all right. The structure was fragile, though, and it might take some time before they got her out. They were readying immense aerosol sprays that would armor-plate the hotel, keep it locked in place.
"Why fragile?" asked Phoebe, naked save for panties. She glistened. Her flat paps looked like coins of a realm long gone, their inscriptions rubbed unreadable.
"Are you afraid of bugs?" asked Sheriff Shunt. "Never mind. Just stay exactly where you are."
Murray rubbed his eyes, grabbed at the last kernels of popcorn, the smell of which had permeated the TV room. The set was on, though in his slumber he must have depressed the mute button. All he could hear were some brave birds calling outside, and the ticking of the cuckoo clock. The ticking seemed loud and disorderly. He got up to use the bathroom. He brought back popcorn, diet cola, a bottle of Naive, leftover Chinese, a muffin, and a loaf of bread. There was a special on the making of "Burton!" which he thought might be interesting.
The sun was high and the air was very clear and the whole world seemed carved of crystal. The windows across from the Oblivion Arms -- belonging to a tobacconist's, a card reader's, and an adoption agency -- lashed almost painfully at the unshielded eye. Brilliant, too, were the puddles frozen seamless along the sidewalks, flaring like medals strewn across a treasury floor. And approaching from every petal of the compass were myriad flashes of light: pieces of sun, caught and borne on the lenses of camera crews. It was supposed to be a quiet set, the entire finger of land cut off from the public; indeed, several of this motley army had arrived over Lake Fiss by ice-sled, pulled by dogs now lolling in the sun. But the news, or whatever this was, reaped what it sowed, and curious Penumbrans circumvented the lackadaisical, and in some cases actually sleeping, security. Evacuees of the "fourth finger" snuck back home for a ringside seat -- little suspecting that what they were watching was not a wound but a cancer, and their homes were to go, in time, the way of Oblivion.
Had Phoebe crept up to the small library window, and stood on a kickstool to have the height to peek, she would have glimpsed this legion of light, but obeying police orders she sat, rigid, on her metal-framed chair. Had she been afforded a view, in time she might have discerned amidst the multiplying crowd three familiar faces. The one on the tallest frame would, ironically, be the one she could identify first. It was Ricer Carr, headmaster of the Iliac Academy at Fistula-on-Ane, stylishly fitted in a cape and hat. A few yards to his right, looking uncomfortable in a blue ski jacket, was Luis, agent for Team Adipose -- and, it might be noted, others.
A few yards to his right, that is to say, at the center of attention, was a short figure swathed in thin robes despite the February cold. The garb ill-concealed a well-tended belly, and its loose gray material displayed, to fine effect, the round, serene face that almost seemed to float above it, like a soft, benevolent moon. The eyes were dark and at the same time radiant. They were large and appeared to be all colors at once. Cameras shot him from every angle, and on live television his baldness was as blinding as any pane of glass. There was no fuzz, only a suggestion of where the hair would grow, as though the pate had been rubbed with a mixture of water and ashes.
Ricer Carr was given a microphone. "Ananda Nada," he asked his much shorter companion, "What have you learned about yourself -- about the world -- since entering the monastery?"
Phoebe heard neither the question nor the response (though Murray would have been able to, had he been watching the right channel). The latter sounded more Judeo-Christian ("...and the Lord taketh away") than Buddhist. Had she heard, she would have recognized the voice of "Ananda Nada." For it was the voice of her son.
Khâder Adipose had returned.
Murray Adipose hummed to himself, thinking idly of his wife, his son, his work. His immersion into the restorative waters of the television set had resurrected the melodic impulse -- ah, that zany, fickle sparrow! -- though he wasn't entirely convinced that the airs in his head weren't simply transparent recombinations of the thousand ad jingles he had just drunk in. But what would be the harm? His old teacher from conservatory, whom he always referred to simply as "the Maestro," was fanatical about deleting anything even remotely personal -- including such things as "ambition" -- from the act of composing.
"And what are you trying to say here?" he would ask, his red pencil hovering over a dishearteningly vast area of Murray's score.
"I conceived of this as the 'Sunlight' passage, where the Cave Dwellers finally--"
"Nein!" the Maestro would shout, despite being French. "Nein, nein, nein!"
Murray's knuckles tingled at the memory of his teacher's merciless pencil-raps.
"It should 'mean' nothing. It should simply be... how to say?... catchy."
To which Murray would inevitably blubber a complaint, but to which the present Murray -- revitalized, commercialized, toe-tapping Murray -- would say: You got it!
He was even about to go to the piano and try out some robust and dollarly measures when the phone, lost in the folds of his crumb-crusted blankets, rang.
"Phoebe?" he said.
"Mr. Adipose?"
"Yes?"
"Front Desk here. Uh -- except we're not exactly 'here.'"
"What?"
"We're outside, about a hundred yards away."
Murray tried looking out of the window, but his muscles all seemed to have atrophied. He slumped back into his position of perfect repose. "Good heavens, what for?"
"We're really sorry about this. We thought you might be with your wife in the library so we didn't call the room."
"Is -- is something the matter with Phoebe?"
"No, of course not, sir. Well, that is to say, she's in no worse position than you. What I mean is you're in roughly the same boat."
"Boat?"
"Please keep your voice down. Like I've been trying to explain, your wife knows all about this. She'll call you soon. The important thing is to stay calm. And don't move. Promise us not to move. Is your TV on?"
Murray wanted to say, Are you kidding?
"You might want to turn to channel 88." The connection was bad. "We'll call back," said the Front Desk. "Just don't move."
It was a special on termites. For the first few minutes Murray was convinced he'd seen it before -- an episode of "Maeterlinck Theater" -- although he soon realized he was thinking of a special on bees. That had been pretty good, so he thought this one had potential.
Rare footage of the queen, ten thousand times bigger than the male of the species. Residences that, if put on a human scale, would be "loftier than the dome of St. Peter's at Rome"; residences that, as is, could house a human. A vast field of haystacks turned out to be a vast field of termitaries. Somehow the producers had infiltrated one of these mounds -- attached a tiny camera on the back of one of its members -- and the intrepid bug filmed it all: the rare, suicidal mating flights; the construction of tunnels to venture in the outside world; the battles with their archfoe, the black ant. They could eat their own excreta. They could determine, before birth, which function each baby termite would have: soldier, worker, sex object. As in, they could choose.
The show over, Murray saw that he had been slowly but surely finishing an old crossword puzzle. Something about the termitary mazes had helped him solve this one. There was one word left, a short word, but he couldn't quite get it yet.
Why the police hadn't instructed him to turn to channel 48 is a mystery. Perhaps the producers of the show, now arrayed at a safe distance outside the Oblivion Arms, interfered, worried that some drama would be lost in the resolution. Murray would have seen Ricer Carr interviewing the monk "Ananda Nada" -- that is, the former Khâder Adipose -- who was growing increasingly silent as a policeman spoke, in his other ear, of the dangers inherent in the hotel. It was a grave situation.
The camera loved Khâder. The three-hour, not terribly interesting special on the making of "Burton!" was still on -- sponsored, hey, by Gnomon Cellular Telephone. Khâder made a pratfall and howled in sham pain.
"But before too long, young Khâder would leave the production, striking out on his own," went the narration. "Melancholy Baby" was discussed, and Khâder's departure from that show mentioned. Sugar Remo, his fourteen-year-old replacement, hit the sauce mercilessly and was fired from the show. She was now a porn star in Japan and looked about forty. They showed footage, blue pixels in the shapes of stars covering nipples and thatch. A dog licked her rudely. She sang, in a ravaged voice, "The present is pleasant/And the past is a gas." Then she farted. The canine jumped back. Murray wept.
"I can barely hear you," said Phoebe. "I think we should hang up now."
They had been talking for a half-hour or so, each thinking they were defusing the other's fear, though in truth every minute was an elaboration on dread. She told him about Armando, about Olivia, but there were too many gaps, and she didn't know how it ended.
"That's okay," said Murray.
Now was not the time to tell him his grandfather had gone insane, or why the Oblivion Arms had been so named. She tried to tell him about Khâder, how he was outside and dressed like a monk, but at that precise conversational moment the static turned tremendous -- deafening. It sounded like the termites were walking all along the connection, taking bites out of words in transit.
"Phoebe!" said Murray, practically singing. "I can't hear you!"
"Shut up!" hissed Phoebe. "We can't talk too loud--"
Outside, the aerosols were firing their liquid armor at the facade. It sounded like a forest of rustling leaves, a gargantuan natural sigh.
"I love you!" shouted Murray. He couldn't hear her anymore and he was scared. Philosophy, Burton writes, is what you believe on your sick-bed; and what was love but the most elemental sort of philosophy? It was inherent in the disciplines name. He remembered a slice of their wedding ceremony, her not unplump hand in his -- or perhaps it was the other way around. He remembered Khâder's first commercial, for a scented diaper in a range of floral designs.
He shouted again and again, at the top of his lungs. Shouts you could hear from outside.
Something, then everything, trembled. Ananda Nada stepped back, and Ricer Carr and Luis dragged him, a bit overdramatically, to safety. The aerosols were spent, their protection already rolling off, useless. Now a creaking could be clearly heard, borne on the wind to the yet-silent audience. Then the hotel emitted groans, and clucks, and the sound of a thousand things giving. A beam could be heard falling, somewhere deep inside. The hotel was materially illusion, just a series of holes now, poised exquisitely for collapse. To touch it would be folly. Ricer Carr reached up to dab his brow; Luis unzipped his parka. With a weird, gargly cry, Ananda Nada, his face set between bliss and nothing, broke free from his guardians and stormed the Oblivion Arms. This was when the crowd went wild.
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