After James (17 page)

I walked to a small church and sat for a few minutes on the steps in the shade. A young mother with two little boys walked by, laughing at something. They were good little boys, I could see, and there was a sureness in their goodness that I envied.

At random I took streets without consulting the map, and walked myself lost. Durant's letter, the pained, skewed vision of it, was all around me now in the city itself, both an
element in which I was suspended, and an endlessly complicated, unfolding event. For the first time I sensed what it must be like for Durant to believe he'd found a voice directed at him personally, a kind of singing inspired by the particular spirit of his lonely nights. Meanings, such as they were, came on delay, and so I was eight or nine strides past the entrance to a watchmaker's shop before the recognition hit me. As I'd passed I registered a set of steps curving up into the dark and a glass case recessed into the space with watches and escapements mounted against a bright red cloth. All of this perceived in an instant, the same instant in which I saw, reflected in the glass, the familiar face. He would have to have been inside the open entrance with his back pressed to the wall. I stopped walking.

Moments later I was in the watch shop, one small room, empty but for me and a large, wattled man behind a desk with a single lens strapped onto his eye, bent over his work like Polyphemus counting sheep. He said nothing, didn't look up. I returned to the street and looked for the man with the mandarin collar but he wasn't to be seen. I walked back the way I'd come for two blocks, turned down a new street, narrow, in shadow. Whether I was trying to find or to lose him I couldn't say. I was following a following, led by a fascination even as I fled it. As my eyes adjusted to the shade, I spotted him up ahead, across the street, his shirt almost the colour of the water-stained wall he walked beside. There was no one else around. I could run and catch him (it seemed he was now trying to escape), but did I really want to confront him? Just then he turned and stole a quick look over his shoulder, directly at me.
I realized that the other times I'd seen the face were in fact as I'd first imagined. It was the same face, exactly, and in his eyes the stranger carried his recognition, or more than that, his
knowledge
of me. As he moved away again he came to a bright cross street and rounded the corner. I ran to catch up and as I took the corner he started down the Spanish Steps.

They were crowded but I saw that by keeping to the nearest side I could make ground on him. He moved along a railing, about a third of the way down, and descended past a garden, then took the main steps at an angle. As he turned sideways to squeeze past an elderly couple, he looked back and saw me, I think, and must have seen that I had a clear path to intercept him, though at no point did his pace quicken. He altered his course laterally, keeping level, and made his way just in time to allow a wedding party ascending the steps to come between us. Amid the celebrants and photographers I lost sight of him and made the error of moving into the stream rather than continuing down the side. When a way finally cleared he was gone. I descended to the street. He should have been visible in one direction or another, but he'd vanished. I returned to the steps and sat.

Surrounded by feet and languages I closed my eyes and tried to think of a northern landscape. Miles of perfect focus in a cold, dry air. On the distant horizon something took shape, like letters of an unknown alphabet, growing, nodding in rhythm. The first humans to the New World brought dogs with them across the land link. When I'd asked about his work one evening Durant showed me pictures from his California lab, including one of a skeleton of
a prehistoric dog with grooves in its shoulders where it had been strapped to its work. Besides the heavy load, the dog carried tuberculosis. It was possible, Durant explained, knowing the genome for the dog from its bones, to know its snout shape and hair colour. It could be simulated exactly with the right programs, or could be cloned and so repeated on earth seventeen thousand years after it died. This strong, coughing dog. “These are the facts,” he'd said. “We can literally make the past get to its feet and look us in the eye. Or some of it.”

I called Amanda, got her voicemail, but on hearing her voice found myself unable to say anything. Whatever I was involved in, it wasn't about the open exchange of information. I needed time to think but time in itself wouldn't be enough. That must have been why I'd followed the stranger.

It was late afternoon, late morning in Montreal.

Upon answering, Dominic sounded weak, I thought, or uncertain. I told him it was me, but he said nothing in response, so I kept talking to give him time to come around. I reminded him that I was in Rome. Dominic loved great cities and the idea of them. Many of his stories began like old romantic novels. “Once in Jakarta…” “Once in Cairo…” The stories were never about literature but instead some intriguing person he knew there, dinner at a consulate, drinks with a despot's most dangerous enemy. The accidental impression was that he'd lived a large, unlikely life that he could not, in fact, tell you about fully, out of duty to some unnamed political principle or silent calling. As his memory declined, the stories began to lose the outlines of sure
character. They developed hesitations, small corrections, then larger ones. Some were obvious conflations he wasn't aware of. Over time the unreliable stories came to damage the old, stable ones I'd always assumed were true. I wanted to save them for him, the real ones, and usually tried to steer him away from new tellings. But to what end? Robbed of the pleasure of telling, in time all he'd have left were verse recitations learned in childhood.

“I'm supposed to be spending my days in a room solving the mysteries of poetry. But it's not working out that way. Things have gotten complicated.” I hoped the sound of my voice would help him locate himself but given what I was saying, I might only have been further confusing him. “How are you, Dominic?”

“I seem to be the same, but more so. What's happening to you?”

“I'm not sure I can explain it.” I said that the Three Sheets site had induced in Durant a feeling of secret communications directed at him personally. And given the volume of commentary around Three Sheets, I wondered if the same thing wasn't happening to other readers, who instead of admitting these feelings in public forums obsessed about the Poet. The whole thing suggested a shared madness.

Until I said it, I hadn't known that's what I thought.

“Then you've discovered something, haven't you, James? Even if your terms are imprecise. Where are you?”

“In Rome.” Already he'd forgotten.

“Rome. Do you know the Italian writer Chiaromonte? I met him there once. He claimed that Shakespeare
understood madness, but in the centuries since, we've eliminated it from our understanding. This hum of rationalism we're stuck with—it forces madness to out in irrational rebellions and destruction.”

“Things were pretty destructive for the Elizabethans, too. And we hospitalize and treat the mentally ill instead of killing them. And even if I believed in such a thing as irrational understanding, I'd still have no idea how to explain this particular weird phenomenon.”

“I accept that.” He paused. Now he was all too self-aware. “Do you know your Roman pagans, James?”

“I haven't met as many locals as I'd hoped.”

“Symmachus wrote that ‘It is not by one way alone that we can arrive at so sublime a mystery.' He's arguing for the proliferation of gods in Roman religion, against the gains of Christianity. It's centuries old, this call to open up other ways of knowing.”

“I'd be happy to arrive at a mystery, as long as it took me in. But I haven't arrived anywhere yet.”

“Be patient. We have to prepare ourselves to receive great understanding.”

“Dominic, I'm being followed.”

“What's that?”

“Someone's following me. I think. A man. A stranger has been following me almost since I got here.”

“Oh. Well then, you really must get to the bottom of that.”

The moment we signed off I began missing him. I pictured him staring at his wall calendar, failing to make sense of it. Even within an ordered system, things get complicated
very fast. There are more possible moves in a game of chess than there are atoms in the solar system. And that's within the squared square of a chessboard. Imagine the square of a boxing ring, the number of possible movements of feet and hands available even to just one fighter, Muhammad Ali exploring the possibilities for deforming the face of his opponent. In the so-called game of the century Bobby Fischer made a move no chess grandmaster would expect, sacrificing his queen for a long-term material advantage. The Londoner had a red T-shirt with a picture of the Queen's face deformed as if with blobs of clay. When he was twenty-two Ali changed his name from Clay. At the time he won the game of the century, Fischer was just thirteen. His twenty-six-year-old opponent, Donald Byrne, taught English at Penn State. His specialty was Keats.

I felt someone looking at me.

The street was an ever-changing sameness. No one paid me any attention. For the few seconds of bounding thought I hadn't been paying attention to myself and a part of me was still floating. It must have been from my imaginary, elevated position that I glimpsed the watcher. I was thinking of the chessboard squares and the rectangles on Dominic's Gardens of Quebec wall calendar, and suddenly my focus was on the ordered lines and rows of windows in the corner building at the foot of the steps. There, in a second-floor window, a movement. A man turning away, disappearing. I hadn't seen him fully but he'd been watching me. It was the stranger with the mandarin collar, the Follower—who else could it have been?—waiting me out. There and not. And from my first visit to
Rome I knew it was not just any room. The building was the Keats-Shelley House. The presence had been looking at me from the room where Keats died. Of tuberculosis.

I ran into the building and up the stairs and stood in the foyer to the small museum, the only way in or out. A young woman waited at the admissions table, not knowing what to make of me as I stood puffing, out of breath.

“No rush,” she said. “We don't close until six.” Her accent was British. Given where we were she assumed I spoke English. I paid the fee and went inside. In the first room were three middle-aged couples and a sleeping white dog. The apartment ran to smaller rooms, left and right. I went right, through a small library, to Keats's little room, with the floral reliefs on the ceiling that were his last vision. It was empty. I stepped to the window, leaned over, and looked. Yes, the spot where I'd been sitting was visible. I waited for a chill to come over me, the certainty that the figure in the window had been the ghost of Keats himself. But the place was only as it seemed. There is nothing as truly dead as a museum. I looked in the other rooms but of course the Follower was gone. I walked out, past the manuscripts in the poet's handwriting, past the glass case morbidly displaying a lock of his fine hair. What could Durant do with the DNA? Might he be able to bring two tubercular creatures back to life? And what would the young Romantic poet, only twenty-five when he died, make of such a wonder?

I told the woman at the entrance that I'd been hoping to catch up to a friend and described the man with the collar. Had she seen him? She had not, but then she'd been away from her desk for the few minutes just before I arrived. She invited me
to check the guest register, in case he'd signed it upon leaving. There were about a dozen names for the day. Some had written comments, in German, Italian, most in English. Some had left email addresses to be informed of coming events. The most recent had signed his name pretty much incomprehensibly, something like “Elias Hepner Voth.” The “From” space Voth had left blank. In the “Comments” he'd written, semi-legibly, the words running together, what might have read, “In our Pantheon. Silence.” followed by an email address: “Rememberthepoet@ostia.” At a glance there was nothing strange about the entry. Keats was certainly in the pantheon of poets, and he'd praised silence for its eternity, most famously in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But the cursive was uncertain. The opening
I
was in an archaic hand, weighed down by the bulb of the loop. The
I
might, in fact, have been an O, and the long trailing skirt on the
n
might have contained another letter. The longer I looked, the more I thought the line read, “One hour. Pantheon. Silence. Remember the poet@ostia.” The fact that the words seemed as if they'd been written in haste only intensified my sense that they weren't about Keats at all, but addressed to me. Once I'd accepted the second reading it came to me—I admit I felt a bit sick at the realization. Ostia was the Roman suburb where Pasolini, poet and filmmaker, was murdered in 1975, or at least where his body was found on the beach. A teen hustler was convicted but, if I remembered correctly—I wasn't about to consult my phone to find out—the killers might have been anticommunists, or extortionists who'd stolen some rolls of his last film, the one with all the sadism.

If I was right, I'd been warned to keep quiet, pricked with a pointed allusion. “Rememberthepoet@ostia” was a death threat. But who would deliver a warning this way? I assumed the threat was empty but couldn't hazard Amanda or Durant, or myself. Back on the street, I didn't take my phone from my pocket in case someone was watching me as I stood there, looking the length of the Via Condotti. The city suddenly seemed as it was, not a place of tourist sites but of sight itself, millions of pairs of eyes, all with their points of view, different light shows playing in each skull. It was hard to imagine that amid all the beauty and history and grappa I could be worthy of anyone's attention. Maybe I'd been mistaken for someone else. Maybe just as Voth's face had at first looked to me like so many others', my own had triggered a false recognition in him. But then why deliver the threat by conjuring a poet's murder? Had he wanted to be spotted and hoped I'd follow or chase him? Had he staged the whole thing? If so I had played along perfectly, even positioning myself below the window in the Keats House. But why not just confront me? No, he wasn't expecting me to come after him, but once into it had improvised beautifully. He must have needed the hour to prepare for the meeting. His game was up, after all, or at least headed that way, and by stalling he maintained an essential advantage. He knew who I was and likely where I lived, and I knew only his face.