My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (15 page)

Reality was not just a portrait in pastels: especially not this November, in this city. Among these strangers he thought he recognized—sober the next morning—were Nietzsche; and Gauguin posing as Lucifer and yes, that detective guy whose name turned out to be—according to Roy Seidel Ota, fence supreme—Andrei Gorbatchev, a Russian spy. Mason took the city tour of West, not East.
This
was Yalta's legacy? This and that half-remembered explosion last night. Anyway, the newspaper had a full story this morning and the waiter told him it was the work of a neo-Nazi group. No RAF fluff. The tour guide had a morbid sense of humor but his English was spotless. He joked about Hess in his cell costing taxpayers thousands: the most expensive prisoner in the world. Mason's memory: Angels with dirty faces live fast and die young. They were approaching The Wall. Its grimness and scars were especially sharp in November dreariness and chill. Checkpoint Charlie and its guardhouse were bleak. Lonely. Ah, snail-paced winter held frozen any sense of, ah, the thrill of victory the agony of defeat or was it . . . Surrounded by porcelain silver gold and glass Mason watched the alien yet known world with mistrust with awesome respect. He was dying to light a Camel. At the end of the tour he strolled at dusk on the mall people-watching. Zaftig women in furs, the Porky Pig-men in business suits and top coats. Charmed strollers of Old Frutz's chic veneer . . . Durchreise and the interchic! A
gaze at secret frosty reminders of the hysteria of bygone. Where? Was he hearing whispers of the death camps and the death packed earth already?

When the bus stopped at Keiser damm Bismarck near the Zoological Gardens for a stop light, about twenty young men in black leather jackets rushed in front of it. Like figures out of an Elizabethan tragedy, they chanted blood. Mason watched three of them beat at the metal and glass of the door. The tour guide was scared. The boys started rocking the bus. A couple of women tourists screamed. An old man stood and shook his cane at the window, shouting in British English to the boys: “Get away, you scoundrels! Go campaign your Nazi propaganda in hell where you belong!” The boys shouted German back at him. Neither could hear the other. Mason cringed. The tour guide forced the old man back to his seat. “Just be calm.” Two or three of the boys now had lighted torches and were shouting threats of fire bombing the bus if the driver didn't open up. Suddenly the light changed to green, the Marquis de Sade's good eye. Mason felt the bus lunge. The boys went crazy. Some of them were hurt. The guide ordered the driver to stop. He slammed on the brakes. A woman standing in the aisle fell. The guide pulled the lever that opens the door. It opened. The torch bearers stormed up into the bus, followed by some of the others. Meanwhile, the sirens of police started up in the distance. The boys grabbed the bus driver, Mason, two women, the Englishman, and marched them out. The captives were roughly pushed into an alley and herded along the narrow paved darkness till they came to a building with an iron sliding-door. One boy was bleeding badly. Mason could hear the honking and bitching of traffic back there where the stopped bus now caused a jam. Police sirens were closer. Mason felt enraged. But the knife at his throat
kept him quiet. He figured the way things were going lately he had to quickly do something aggressive or he'd lose not only what little identity he had left but his entire existence. The kidnappers knocked them along a long dark corridor till they reached an elevator. They were kicked and shoved onto it. The leather-jackets, six or seven of them, crowded on too. They were nervously chattering away, barking at each other, snapping orders to Mason and the others. It was minutes before one, then another, switched to English. Their English was excellent. When they were all finally locked in a dimly lighted room far beneath the earth, the leather-jackets slapped the women for whimpering which only made them cry harder. The Englishman got a knee in the balls when he tried to defend the ladies. Mason was taken to a separate room, one the size of a closet. A single uncovered bulb hung from the ceiling. The two young men who'd led him there smiled at him. “I'm Franz.” “I'm Alfred. We know you Americans like to use first names. We know your name already: Right?” “No.” “Oh, yes we do.” “Oh, no you don't.” “Oh, yes we do.” Franz, a red-faced youth with a preppy haircut, punched Mason in the nose. “We said yes we do.” Mason swung at the guy but Alfred blocked the effort and drove a serious-business fist into Mason's guts. Mason folded, holding the area with the delicate and passionate concern one might give to an exotic, newly captured bird. Outside, in the larger room he heard the sounds of brutality, hysterical outbursts, and the small whimperings of grim diffidence and taciturnity. While Franz and Alfred quietly but intensely discussed some urgent matter, Mason entertained himself with a song he'd sung as a small child when he was the seeker rather than the hunted: Three pound of beans/ Three pounds of greens/ Who not ready holler queens./ Strawberry chocolate vanilla pie/ Who not ready holler I. I'm not ready. Ran to the rock. What an indecent moment, full of obscene godforsaken torment. Alfred squatted before Mason. “My friend, you are now going to tell us all about the Magnan Rockford Foundation. Okay? Ready?” Mason grunted. Franz kicked Mason's thigh. “Start from the beginning.” “We have ways of
getting you to talk,” Alfred assured Mason. He had broken teeth, yellowed from too many cigarettes. He was lighting one now. He blew the smoke in Mason's face. It made him want one too. Mason smelled the cigarette smoke but he also smelled another kind of smoke. Smoke was coming in under the door. Franz and Alfred too were aware of it. In German, Franz said he'd go to see what was going on. Alfred handed Mason the cigarette. “Unfortunately, this may be your last fag. Enjoy. You see we plan to break you of many habits. Smoking may be one of them. A lot depends on you. Our mission has started in Berlin, the hottest place—politically speaking—in the western world. Unlike in Hitler's dream for the future, we plan to include the likes of you. The Magnan-Rockford Foundation doesn't know it, but it's going to help us, the way Ford helped Hitler. We have plans here in Berlin you wouldn't believe. On your little precious tour I'm sure you saw some of our targets. Among them, that Jewish Community Center on Fasanenstrasse, is going to speak to the world for us.” Mason inhaled. He let the smoke out in Alfred's face. At this moment all hell broke loose the door was kicked in and torrents of smoke poured in. Men in fireproof suits, wearing gas masks stood ten deep at the door holding machine guns. In German, Alfred and Mason were told to surrender. They put up their hands.

Everything changed. On the plane to Frankfurt he lighted a Camel. Holding it by its hind legs he watched the hair along the hump sizzle: its smell, a fresh skid mark. “Turkish & Domestic Blend.” The city on the back was hot and dry: just the place to be: down through clouds: a glimpse of the vast metropolis. Settled in, he took the train out to Mainz and arrived at eleven sharp. Professor Rudolf Semler gave him a warm but brief intro and the students in the typical German fashion rapped
their desks with approval. Hating the taste of a recently smoked Coffin Nail he climbed up. But it was better than Alfred's smoke in his face. Hungover, the would-be decided to try to merge his personal disaster with its desolation and psychic gangplanks from Georgia to Chicago and from the inner coils of his longing to Be-Somebody-Safe to their—or what he imagined to be their Black Forest, their old-woman-roasting-children-in-the-oven, Tristan and Isolde and their stained glass-fear of the same
unknown
he feared. Dreamer! Mason dared trust a blind connection: It was as insane as dumbass engineers of say a spermbank scheme—the gimmick of a nut with the smell of Hitler's asshole coming from the lower depths of the throat. These bright-eyed undergraduates? connect to
his
mysteries? What shape could they put to the incongruous rubbish merged in this voice-filled presence? Perfection can never be deliberate! . . . Think about it: his crazy sea his gentle ladies fanning themselves his maze of one-night-stands his quickies his harsh knife-warfare-life behind the walls of Attica his, praytellblasted Celt! Could they see their own secrets through him and see through him? How about the crushed and cursed desperate enterprise of that night's rush to the isolated trainyard as a connective tissue in the action? Should they? And this deeper question (even halfway admitted to himself) of scathed name, of forged identity with its built-in layer upon layer of the genuine the unreal the sort-of-authentic, the honest geocentric force of the gray area—what of all this? What of this complex, plumed and damned quest to . . . well,
you
know the story! I don't cast the first stone, mind you. Well, at least he hadn't stumbled going up on the stage to face, three or four hundred faces. Here in this tiny city where the printing press had its beginning, Mason wanted so much to leave an imprint: to inform with form, to push a verbal text beyond a pretext. What could he on the other hand take away with him? That ancient sound of the press's grinding and the hard stone of germanic faith . . . ? He tried everything: forced connections, exchange and conflict, the secret design, you name it. You gotta give him a bit of credit I guess: he
did
reach these inheritors of another kind of
difficult history without telling them about his ancestors of West Africa and the Middle Passage and the pit. And the centuries. What he said was, at best, symbolic: the plan was this: survive and try to survive without too much humiliation and gracelessness. Nietzsche was right on at least one point: writers wrote to conceal. The possible reality of the effort? Mason's good intentions were not writerly, folks. He wanted out from under. He spoke a convincing game. Hark! Whatcha do wid dat? Had Mason's fear tipped the scales—now that he was insanely sure his game'd been peeped, at least by me—or would he swing the other way toward arrogance and defiance, toward graceless combat with shadows armed-to-the-teeth with expert weaponry? You're close enough: Ask
him.
Mason, step forward, my son:
speak
!

“ . . . then he opened the closest door and went in. Blitzkrieg! Suddenly he was at sea . . . Commander of his own vessel, his guest was Captain William Robinson from the Hope-well. Robinson suspected a bunko-game? Gag on him . . . as they fried the fat in gabby Gaelic, Clay Potter listened to Robinson's tale of entrapment in a circus of battleships two days out of London a year ago . . . Clay then had his tale of woe: here on the Celt-Prodigal he'd been lucky to still have his head on his shoulders since the mates were restless and surely plotting something horrible . . . Clay'd delivered those classifiers to their destination where, heck, they were probably still scraping bird shit and slime and the petrified bone-dust of woodchat's from the pottery found at the bottom of the sea. A bronze bucket, the classifiers told Captain Clay, had been found near the coast of Liberia. Cap'n Potter went on: ‘They found the remains of Shine near there, too.’ Robinson hadn't heard of Shine but knew legends the slave traders'd brought back . . . Potter advised him to read a recent book:
The Memoirs of Madame Rose Marie Butler
Williams, Grand Queen of the Best-Time-in-Town-Bar-and-Hotel on Butler Street.
It was full of sensational and historical information given her by sailors . . . Robinson was visibly getting sleepy from the sweet wine. Potter walked with him to his cabin. They shook. After leaving his guest Potter, assuming he was still in control, returned to his cabin. His first mate was there. Captain Clay Potter had another story for Robinson in the morning. This, faithful reader, was the breakfast-table tale Robinson got: ‘My first mate was in a gumbo frenzy. Sir, he said, shaking like Clarence Snow in a Shirley Temple icky-flick, w-w-we, uh, a-ain't no longer at sea! (
Christ
, Jesus as a Hollywood
coon
of the 1930s?—
Come on!
Some jinx on Latino vibes!)
What in the devil do you mean, man—speak up
? We are moving, uh, across
land
, uh, Sir. Nonsense! I shouted in his—. Uh, Sir, come take, uh, look, Sir. I followed him to my trusty porthole. He stood respectfully aside, waiting with the jitters for—. My clay-lined porthole didn't lie. Mirror, mirror. By jimmydecricket, my First Mate was on target, was not just a fragment, a stooge, a yoyo. We
were
moving across
land
! But, I cried, we don't have no wheels—how can this be! Together me and my sidekick trotted up on deck and dashed toward the bow to discover a team of oxen under their oxbows. I needed oxygen—no, an oxygen-
tent
! Chicago, New York, Attica, Air Force, no place was
like
this! The oxen were dragging my honey through mud. Her skirts—filthy. I shouted to Jesus: Gib me my periscope! You Dumbbell! I snatched it from his claw. Through it I saw far into the future: my success—critical acclaim, money, position, travel, the works. Looks like a form of civilization, I murmured, as I looked through the magic glass beyond the foreshadowing to the background: of trees and huts and dark people in grass skirts carrying on their heads buckets of Amesville fertilizer, baskets of excellent clocks, sacks of wild oats, netted-bundles of pomegranates, Cadillac parts, boxes of turtles packed in ice, and Cross Damon's crash at Roosevelt Road. Resigned, I whimpered. Where'd we get the oxen? Mates had ’em down dare in de hole, Sir: in case uv ah ’mergency. I cleared my bellyaching-throat.
Jesus whined. But, Sir, there should be another sea or at least a lake or a river, Sir, up ahead—beyond that batch of celt trees and curoi mountains. I hoped he was right as I wondered about the inconsistency of his speech: was this spic putting
me
on? Speak! Oh, well. I hope you're right, Mister Jesus. I had no Annie Oakley off the floater, so I returned to the submerged discomfort of my cabin. I took out my best maps: of the unknown worlds; spread them on my children's faces (I heard them whimpering under there with many axes to grind). There was the famous Blue Arrow the Fall River the Mary Lake the Grand Lake the Shadow Mountain the Green Ridge the Stillwater the Emerald Lake the Rainbow Curve the Crystal Lake the Lawn Lake the Odessa Lake the Thunder Bay the Fish Creek the Dream Forest the Spruce Lake the Baron Lake the Sad Lake the Telephone Route the Well-Entrance, I'll-Be-Damned County, Nymph River, Jungle Jim Cove, the Scenic Peak, the Junction of Highway Fifty-five and Sixty-six next to Deer Meadow and the Snake River. No celt tricks. It was all there all clear but where could I place my
x
? I wanted to be able to say, ‘I am here!’ I certainly wasn't anywhere near old pal Billy of Chicago, a sailor who taught me to sail, Blue-jersey Jerk, Jack Tar, Siwash, nor near Paradise or Ponderosa or Granby or Bluebird or Billy Barnacle, nor Sandbeach or Bonaparte's or Iceland's Second Winter or Skua or Razorbill or Puffin or Little Auk or Nightjar or Pinewood or Sea Crab, or Buttermilk Bottom, or Swab-jockey Point, or Corinth, or Lyons or the Egyptian picnic area nor the Bearded-Tit section of Water Dog Falls or South Side or Beaver-Nice or Antique Creek or Avant-Garde River or Clarenceberg Heights of Zedtwitz Star or Moca Ridge or Gwen Falls or Mafia Meadow or Ala or Nipson Womb or Zimm Lake or—hell, all those places were back a ways. Likely I was not any longer on the map. (Maybe I'd accidentally given my best maps to Cap'n Robinson.) Nope: no longer on the—up here beyond the frame of the C-shaped map. I looked at the table top where the map ended. Doesn't look like much: Just a table top. I sniffed a rat and avoided using the back of my left hand to wipe away the tear running down my right cheek.’”