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.
