The Oblivion Arms - 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.
