Very Old Bones (10 page)

I’d given her that Leica thirty-five-millimeter with wide-angle lens, filters, light meter, the works, infecting her with light and shadow. She had moved well beyond the usual touristy
snaps of me at the Köln Cathedral, or the Wurzburg Castle, and had come to think of the camera as her Gift of Eyes, the catalyst for her decision to seek out the images that lurk on the dark
side of the soul. She was beginning to verify her life through the lens of her camera, while I, of a different order, was pursuing validation through hallucination, which some have thought to be
demonic; and I suppose I have courted the demonic now and again.

I once told Giselle she was the essence of the esemplastic act, for as she was giving me the curl of her tongue at that moment, she would pause to speak love words to me in three languages. That
spurred me to lecture her on unity, a Greek derivation. “There is no shortage of unity but much of it is simulated,” I began. “The one from the many is no more probable than many
from the one. Only sea life propagates in solitude. But here, behold the esemplastic! . . . the unity of twain—I speaking, you comprehending, I delivering, you receiving, I the supplicant,
you the benefactor, I me, you thee (I was within her at that moment), and yet we are loving in a way that is neither past, present, nor future, but only conditional: a time zone that is eternally
renewable, in flux with mystery, always elusive, and may not even exist.”

She didn’t know what I was talking about, but here I was, back in that elusive time zone at Fritz’s Garden of Eden, melting with the heat of love and penance when she arrived. I was
standing on what passed for a bar in this hovel of depravity, holding a glass of red wine, in shirtsleeves, delivering a singsong harangue to my audience, and biting myself on the right hand.
Giselle wondered: Is he really biting himself?

“Jesus was the new Adam, and I report to you that I am the new Jesus,” I proclaimed, and then bit myself just below the right shoulder, and everybody laughed. A stain spread on my
sleeve as I talked. Giselle thought it was a wine stain.

“Jesus descended into hell, and what did he find? He found my wonderful, lascivious mother, my saintly, incestuous father. He found all of you here, this carnival of panders and half-naked
whores, scavenger cripples, easy killers, and poxy blind men. He found you burglars and dope fiends, you crutch thieves and condom salesmen, you paralytic beggars and syphilitic hags, all doomed
and damned to this malignant pigmire for an eternity of endless and timeless sin.”

The audience hooted and whistled its approval of my sermon (Giselle took a photo of them) and I laughed wildly and bit myself on the palm of my left hand, then dripped blood from my thumb into
my wineglass (Giselle took another photo, sending the carnival into a new eruption of applause). What she had thought to be wine was obviously my blood, and so she moved closer to where I could see
her, and when she came into view I stopped my harangue. I snatched up my coat, jumped down from the bar, sucking my hand and balancing my wine, and I kissed Giselle on the mouth with my bloody
lips. She backed off from me and raised her camera.

“I want you to see yourself as you are tonight,” she said to me, and I opened both palms outward to show her where I had invested myself with the stigmata of the new Jesus.

“We must leave,” I said to her. “They all want to kill me for my coat and suit. And they’ll kill both of us for your camera.”

“Where is your whore?” she asked me.

“She’s working, over there,” I said, and I pointed to the table where my Gisela was fellating the handless wrist of a one-eyed beggar whose good hand was somewhere inside her
blouse.

Giselle rapidly snapped photos of this, and of the entire mob, as the rabble eyed us and whispered. I broke my wineglass on the floor as we retreated, insuring that at least the barefoot and
shoeless freaks would think twice before following us. We fled Fritz’s Garden, leaped into the stolen Mercedes, and I then drove through the dark streets and woodlands of Frankfurt,
zigzagging at wild speed, turning on two wheels (or so it felt) into a place that seemed to be a wall and certain death but was an alley, as I saw, though Giselle didn’t, and she chose to
scream.

“Let me out!” she yelled, and I slowed the car.

“Are you bored?” I asked.

“I find death boring. Why should I die because my husband wants to? I find it boring.”

“You certainly have style, Giselle, to think about death when we’re out for a joy ride.”

I reached behind the driver’s seat and found a small package, then deftly, with one hand, unwrapped it to reveal four bratwurst afloat in mustard, and I offered the mess to Giselle. She
set it on her lap and I then found my bag of
Brötchen
, and while holding the steering wheel with my knee, I split a
Brötchen
, stuffed a bratwurst into its crevice, hot-dog
style, and handed it to her.

“Is this today food?” she asked.

“As I recall.”

“How long since you bought this?”

“Time means nothing to me.”

“It means everything to bratwurst.”

“Trust me.”

“Are you in your right mind?”

“No, nor have I ever been. My life is a tissue of delirious memory.”

“What do you remember?”

“Peculiar things. The Captain’s hypocritical face when we met at MP headquarters after my arrest. The smell of my father’s whiskey-and-tobacco breath when I was twelve. The
desire to raise a handlebar mustache like my father’s. The spasms of bliss that always punctuate the onset of love with you. Why do you ask?”

“I was curious about your saintly incestuous father.”

“Did I speak of my saintly incestuous father?”

“You did.”

“I can’t account for it. May I take off your clothing?”

“It remains to be seen.”

“I would stop the car, of course.”

“That would improve our chances of not dying a hideous death.”

I stopped the car and went for the back of her neck, running one hand under her hair and with the other seeking blouse burtons. She pushed me away and got out and I instantly broke into a fit of
sobbing. The sobs choked me, my body twisted, my face fell into the bratwurst, and I made the noises a man makes when he knows that the sorrows of the world are his alone.

Giselle came round to my side of the car and opened my door, tugged me up and out. I stopped sobbing, rubbed the mustard off my face, and she and I walked together on strange streets, she
silent, I smiling with what came to be known as my zombie joy. Giselle didn’t know where to take me. I’d been a fugitive now for two days and she feared premature contact with the
military. My wounds, though not serious to look at, were a problem; for she envisioned the Military Police ignoring them and throwing me into a cell where I’d molder in my zombie coma,
oblivious to the venomous impact my own morbid bites might be having on my body.

“You bit yourself, Orson,” she said to me.

“Bit yourself,” I said.

“Our mouths are full of poison,” she said.

“Yes. Pyorrhea. Gingivitis.”

“What if you bit your own hand and infused the pyorrhea into your fingers?”

The thought gave me pause. I stopped walking and looked at my hand.

“Pestilential saliva,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Bronchial methanes, colonic phosgenes. Can they become agents of involuntary suicide?”

“I think you’re getting the idea,” she said.

The perception raised my spirits and Giselle decided to call Quinn, who would be getting ready for reveille, the sun now breaking through the final moments of the night. Quinn had access to a
Jeep and had contacts with German newspapermen who would know where to get me treated. I liked Quinn and trusted him, which certainly proves something. I didn’t know he’d been in love
with Giselle since the night she performed on the high stool at the Christmas party. Quinn went to dinner with us now and again and I saw that Giselle found him appealingly innocent.

Quinn did know a doctor, an ex-medical officer in the Wehrmacht who had a small general practice in the suburb of Bonames. He treated my five bite wounds and then we went back to our apartment,
where Giselle bathed me, washed the pomade out of my hair, and dressed me in my uniform so I would surrender as a soldier, not a madman. I was contrite at the surrender, but in a moment of
messianic candor I told the officer of the day I had been to hell and back and was now prepared to redeem the world’s sins, including his.

They put me in tight security and limited my visitors to Giselle and an army psychiatrist, Dr. Tannen, who saw the condition I was in and transferred me to an army hospital. It became clear I
was not fit to stand court martial.

“The man seems to have had a psychotic episode, but I would not say he’s psychotic,” the doctor told Giselle in my presence, as if I didn’t exist. “He is living in
the very real world of his second self, where there is always an answer to every riddle. He believes he is a bastard, an unwanted child. He was seriously neglected by mother and father, though he
exudes love for them both. He is so insecure that he requires a façade to reduce his anxieties to manageable size; and so every waking moment is an exercise in mendacity, including
self-delusion. He has found no career direction, and has completed nothing of significance to himself. He left the publishing world, rejects teaching and journalism, loathes the army, and rues the
inertia that allowed him to be called back to active duty. He sees nothing worth doing, including completing the last contorted sentence of his unfinished book, which now ends on a high note of
suspense with a comma. He is a man for whom money means nothing, but who has wrapped himself inside a cocoon of such hubris that he centers his life at the apex of the
haut monde,
as he
calls it, a world for which there is no equivalent in reality, at least not without much more money than he possesses. Seated beside him at this apex is you, my dear, his goddess of the
unattainable moon. He never quite believes you are really his wife, and so, when he reaches out to impose love upon you and you push him away, his moon explodes, and he drops into near catatonia,
his so-called zombie condition.”

I nodded my agreement, which amused Giselle and also the doctor, who continued: “To finance his life with you in the
haut monde
, he thrust himself into the petty criminality that
now threatens his freedom. Further, after his arrest, and being simultaneously abandoned by his mentor in corruption, Meister Geld, a man about whom he knows almost nothing, he is once again the
bereft bastard, without parent, without salvation. He is the unredeemable, loathsome, fear-ridden orphan of the storm, living in the shadow of an achieved father, crippled, he thinks, by the genes
of unknown ancestors, and now with a future that holds only degradation, possibly of a lifelong order. And so he descended into a neurotic abyss, and resurrected from it in the guise of a
blasphemous new Jesus, the only saviour available in this profane world he now inhabits. The army would be as mad as he is to put him on trial in this condition.”

The army, citing my illness and my sterling war record, moved me toward a medical discharge. Dr. Tannen also announced that his tour of army duty was at an end, and that he was returning to
private practice in Manhattan. This news plunged me into a new depression.

As I slowly came out of it, I was released from the hospital, and at the sunny lunch hour of the third day I told Giselle I wanted to go to the Künstler Klause to dance. It was the first
time I’d expressed interest in doing anything since my collapse. The dismissal of the charges buoyed my spirit, but the impending loss of my therapist weighed on me. Giselle asked him if he
would take me as a patient back in Manhattan, and he said of course. She then made the private decision to send me home alone.

Eva the belly dancer was one of the Künstler Klause’s attractions, along with a magician and a four-piece band—trumpet, drums, violin, and accordion. The club was cheap glitz
with a marine decor. Fishnets adorned with anchors, marlin, and mermaids formed the backdrop for the small stage and modest dance floor. The waiter lit the table candle when we sat down, and as we
listened to the music I became intensely happy. The club’s crowd was mostly Germans, with a few GIs. Quinn came in while the band played.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to him.

“I asked him,” Giselle said. “I thought we’d celebrate your first night out.”

“That’s a fine idea,” I said.

“I’d like some wine,” Quinn said to the waiter. “Moselle.”

“Moselle all around,” I said and I took a fifty-mark note out of my pocket.

“Put your money away,” Quinn said.

Quinn looked very young. He had large even teeth and a handsome, crooked smile that gave him a knowing look.

“I saved the good news for our party,” Giselle said.

“What good news?” I asked.

“Quinn started it,” she said. “He sent my photographs to
Paris Match
and they bought them. Isn’t that something?”

“That’s quite something,” I said. “What photographs?”

“The photos of you at Fritz’s Garden, you and all those freaks. The editors said they hadn’t seen anything like this out of Germany since the early thirties. Isn’t that
remarkable?”

“Photos of me?” I said.

“No one could recognize you,” she said. “You were biting yourself.
Paris Match
is using four pictures and they have an assignment for me in Berlin.”

I said nothing.

“I did very little,” Quinn said. “I just put her in touch with the editors. The pictures sold themselves. Not only that, the magazine’s art director knew Giselle’s
mother very well.”

“She knew everybody in art,” Giselle said.

“So Giselle comes by her talent naturally,” Quinn said.

“She’s a natural, all right,” I said, and I heard that my voice had gone flat.

Eva the belly dancer came on, dancing close to the ringside tables so men could stuff money into her belt, which rode well below the belly

“I remember her,” I said when I saw Eva. “People insulted her at the Christmas party.” I took my fifty marks out of my pocket again and tucked it into Eva’s belt,
just under the navel.