After James (9 page)

 

The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other's dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or of music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one will be the key.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Coleridge's Dream”

T
he last thing my mother sent me was a picture she'd taken of a cuneiform tablet in a small museum in Anatolia. At the top, a loinclothed king or god in profile, perspectiveless, the sun and moon above, and below, columns of tiny scratchings, letters, language leaping from stone. The image was badly lit. She must have stood to the side to move the glare from an overhead bulb to the margin of the tablet. I can picture her looking into the window of her phone, taking a side step, tapping the screen. She wrote, “The work's going well, though your father still seems to think the problems in refugee camps owe to a lack of decorum and matching eating utensils. We're sightseeing for two days. Tomorrow off to those big old slabs,” meaning the stelae at Göbekli Tepe, site of the world's first religious temple, which they never did see. How bluely ironic that this last dashed-off email should have attached to it an image of a language grown from pictorial symbols carved on a hard slab of reality very like the headstones that serve now as their alter-presences. And cuneiform,
so beautiful. From drawings in sand to sandstone to granite, Hittite and Sumerian to Semitic symbols to Greek, ox/house/camel/door became
aleph
,
beth
,
gimel
,
daleth
became
alpha
,
beta
,
gamma
,
delta
, the signs moving back and forth from yard to shelter, nature to artifice, country to settlement. In their origin alphabetical letters had the breadth to mark both the wild and the cultivated.

The NGO called me in Montreal, first with the news, then with the arrangements. I flew to Halifax to meet the so-called mortal remains, held steady through a small service, and saw them into the ground. When I looked up, suddenly orphaned, I decided to take to the skies.

In time I was living with a petite Londoner in a one-bedroom apartment in La Latina, a neighbourhood in Madrid. We sampled the city cheaply, hitting the discount hours in museums and bars, attaching ourselves to English groups on architecture tours, attending street protests, chanting in bad Spanish. On TV, soap operas confused us and soccer billionaires scored goals and then tore off in some direction as if chased by guard dogs. She worked as a copy editor for a travel magazine. For a few weeks she indulged me in language games, with imposed restrictions. No definite articles over dinner (“Please pass a pepper grinder.”), only one adjective for the weekend (“Then how would you describe me?” I asked. “You are insufficiently friended.”). No one-word utterances. Responding to any question of five words with a rhyme (“Do you like this dress?” “…The hemline's low. I'd prefer less.”). I reasoned that the games marked us as distinct, kept us quick. Then the challenge of
them became limiting, like badly fitted clothes, binding the limbs in mismeasured forms. For a time it seemed we'd never free ourselves, that we'd go mad together. We stopped having sex. And so we called off the games. It took a while to break ourselves of the habit of listening a certain way, for lapses or possibilities. We went silent, hours at a time, and, on the other side of silence, broke up.

Or that isn't what happened. What happened was she realized she could no longer watch me sit motionless. To her I seemed to move at a great speed while reading or staring out the window at the crowds in the El Rastro flea market. She said, “You sit still the way other people run for their lives.” She thought I'd turned sitting into an act of cowardice, a way of avoiding hard truths. One day the truth was that she had fallen for her Spanish teacher and was moving in with him.

Alone, I cut all expenses. I quit smoking, lived on pasta and butter, but in the end my means ran down. As I left for good with my duffle bag, my landlord, a sad-eyed Italian Spaniard, held open the door and clasped me on the deltoid. “You are real. Real poets do not pay rent.” He'd seen me reading poetry and assumed I wrote the stuff. In truth I am only a failed poet. A failed many things. Bartender, textbook editor, doctoral student, orchestra publicist. I have no talents but reading.

I landed back in Montreal, living in a former professor's basement. He was the closest thing to family I had left. A memory disorder had forced him into early retirement. Now his old
students took turns going with him to medical appointments and grocery stores, looking after him in exchange for a basement room. Most hours of the day he was himself, lucid, funny, the Dominic Easley we all knew. But there were slips and lapses, especially in the evening, after wine. One night as we walked through the residential streets he tried to introduce me to his neighbour, a large woman out inspecting her garden. The neighbour and I understood even before Dominic that he'd lost my name, and as I said who I was, it was he who listened with the greater interest. That night in the basement I had never felt so unknown, even to myself. The feeling wasn't loneliness but rather two emotions held together, one sadness, a simple word that simply applied, and the other something borrowed from Dominic, a distilled sense of being, of possibility, as if I had entered a state of perpetual, dreadful expectation.

Contained in that dim basement I felt something in approach. Then, out of nowhere, a stranger named August Durant sent me an e-ticket to Rome and an offer of six hundred USD a week to stay with him and conduct what he called “literary-detective work.” He stressed that he wasn't hiring me as a sexual companion. I would put my one talent in service of solving “a mystery of dimensions unknown” even to him. I was without other prospects. Either I found paid work or I'd become accommodated to the sorry view of myself as destined for still more years of drift and small failures, trying to stay out in front of hard truths. But a detective. Hack gumshoe or houndstooth or hard-boiled? Would I be figuratively armed? Would there be a good story? Would its end be mine?

Words grow out of the world and then back into it, made of the very history they string together. An enduring one comes out of the Old English
morðor
, the Old Norse
morð
, and several related variants, meeting the line from the medieval Latin
murdrum
and the Anglo-French
murdre.
The word is there very near the origin of stories, right after first light, and now it's all through every story, even when it doesn't seem to belong and we imagine we don't see it.

Durant knew me as the author of an online rant I'd gone so far as to give a title: “The Poet at the End of the World.” There had appeared on the internet a new poetry site called Three Sheets. The anonymous host posted only his or her own poems, most short, some untitled, and yet amid all the traffic noise, the page drew a surprising aggregate of readers, for a poetry site. At first these readers were other poets and academics, who within six weeks built two new sites devoted entirely to the verse of the mystery poet who for a time was called the New Anonymous, or Nanny for short, and to the enigma of his or her identity. Theories sprung up around the names and cities and historical events alluded to in the poems. Something calling itself the Group Against Three Sheets (GRATS) arose to attack Nanny for “a mockery of the provocateur spirit” and to pronounce Three Sheets “insufficiently political in its conception.” Another, the Group Against the Group Against Three Sheets (GRAGRATS), the name and acronym chosen, as its founding manifesto stated, precisely for their absurdity, considered the anonymity central to what came to be called the Project, and defended the poet's choice to remain unnamed, and even insisted that there be no provisional designations, and
so asked that people stop using “Nanny” to mean “the anonymous one” (uncapitalized), a corrective that somehow became widely adopted. (GRAGRATS) chose the symbol @ to designate the poet. The rest of us just called him or her the Poet.

One morning in the Montreal basement I'd taken a stroll past the Sheets-inspired sites, read the latest skirmishes, which usually amused me unintentionally, and came away wanting to throw stones at both sides. In any country, debates among poets are comically vicious, the stakes being so low. Though I'd intended never to add my voice to the babble, I couldn't stop from saying what no one else would say and posting it on the Sheets Project Meta-Site of Record (SHEPMETSOR). Roughly reduced, my point was that the debates over Three Sheets were being conducted almost entirely by people with no feeling whatsoever for poetry, mostly academics and bad poets, and were these people capable of reading better, they'd see that the Poet was addressing an audience in the habit of filtering out bleatings such as theirs, and that, in fact, the most coherent theme or subtext discernible in the Poet's work suggested not a communal, consensual, or debatable set of ideas, but rather a soul's draw toward a single, fixed mystery.

“The mystery itself is unnamed. Is it a lost loved one? a lost god? All we find is an absence. Absence is the most present thing in the poems.” I'd fallen into a conviction and was more or less stabbing the keys. “Most of you are failing the Poet and the poems. As readers, you are thin where you should be thick, and otherwise thick through and through.”

That last line now embarrasses me. I don't sound like myself, even myself in prose. Dominic chose not to call me
on the brattiness of the tone, or the generalization I'd made about academics, though he was a better and more soulful reader than I. He read Durant's letter of invitation, looked in on Three Sheets, and pointed out that I was entertaining a solicitation from someone unstable or at least very likely in one of the categories of thin readers that I'd attacked.

“If you need the money, though, you can always tell yourself that this Durant must concur with your reading of the Poet, and so taking his money might not be ignoble. And anyway, it's not just money, it's Rome!”

It was more than Rome, in the end, but in Rome it began.

The next week I handed over my room and caretaking duties to a former classmate and flew off, anticipating disaster. Dominic had gifted me a few nights in a budget
residenza
in Trastevere. I had been to Rome once before, with no money, and seen the sights, sipped the coffee at Tazza d'Oro, felt the black cobblestones in the soles of my feet, in my throat, under my eyelids when the last stranger home turned out the light in the room for males in a hostel near Termini Station. I'd been alone then, in my early twenties, and now eight years later was alone again. Being always in silence had left me without a means for any human gesture toward comprehension, and the traffic and murmuring tourists only sharpened for me the silence of the buildings and stones, and cast me, in some faux-Romantic sense, with the dead.

In my small room I consulted my laptop to see what was happening at Three Sheets. There had been no new
posts in a week, an unusual but not unprecedented quiet. When the site went still for a time I imagined the Poet entirely unplugged, reading old books, then wandering on a farm or in village streets somewhere temperate. He/she lived in a moderate climate, I deduced, but came from an extreme one, which was why the “runt days” with their “uncentered bubble of light”—winter days, surely—seemed to her/him “a native, wet element.” Only a nonnative would feel a damp cold as “native.” Of course the Poet might have been imagining the damp, or remembering a place where she (let's say) no longer lived, but the description had appeared in February, with a topical reference to fires then ravaging Australia (“an outback town in cinders”).

Durant's email notes had been short, not unfriendly but neither giving anything away. Before accepting his offer I'd found him on a faculty page at a private school in California I'd never heard of, Larunda College. The page had no photo and only a brief professional biography. August Durant had studied genetics at Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and had taught at the University of Michigan for twelve years before moving to Larunda, where, it seemed, he taught very little. He was affiliated with universities in France, Holland, and England. The linked CV gave me a sense of his age—judging from when he finished his graduate work, he'd now be in his early sixties—and listed dozens of publications, the titles of which meant nothing to me except one on the American poets Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. It was odd that he'd written an academic paper on poetry, and odder still that he'd listed it among all the articles
on evolutionary biology and DNA transference on his CV, where it would mean nothing to his professional standing. He must have been proud.

The CV hadn't been updated in three years. What had he been doing recently? I used Dominic's access to online academic searches to learn that Durant had coauthored a successful and sizeable research grant on something called “molluscan phylogeny” (I couldn't remember what
phylogeny
meant and could have sworn there was a
k
at the end of
mollusc
). He'd published a single paper, back in the first months of the grant, but nothing since. A distracted program assistant at the biosciences department told me that Durant was on leave. I said I was considering an application to Larunda, and she offered that Durant's leave was “indefinite.” He was not available to supervise research. “Is he retired?” I asked. “You can think of him that way,” she said.

Apart from his professional life, there was scant evidence to read of him. Surely he knew even less about me, yet he seemed to have great confidence that I was his man, whether or not I knew it. “You can ask me whatever you like,” he wrote. “The plane ticket would have proven to most that I'm serious. All it really proves is that I have enough money to play my hunch, and anyway, even once you realize I'm serious, you still have to decide if I'm someone you can work for.” He was right, but now that I'd used the ticket, my concern wasn't that he'd deceived me but that he'd learn I was a less talented reader-detective than he'd imagined. There's a degree of cowardice or fraudulence in every reader who feels the need, upon closing a book, to open his mouth.