Moon Palace Page 14

  It didn’t take me long to get the hang of the wheelchair. There were a few bumps on the first day, but once I learned how to tilt the chair at the proper angle when we went up and down curbs, things went fairly smoothly. Effing was exceedingly light, and pushing him around caused little strain on my arms. In other respects, however, our excursions were rather difficult for me. As soon as we got outside, Effing would begin jabbing his stick into the air, asking in a loud voice what object he was pointing at. As soon as I told him, he would insist that I describe it for him. Garbage cans, shop windows, doorways: he wanted me to give him a precise account of these things, and if I couldn’t muster the phrases swiftly enough to satisfy him, he would explode in anger. “Dammit, boy,” he would say, “use the eyes in your head! I can’t see a bloody thing, and here you’re spouting drivel about ‘your average lamppost’ and ‘perfectly ordinary manhole covers.’ No two things are alike, you fool, any bumpkin knows that. I want to see what we’re looking at, goddammit, I want you to make things stand out for me!” It was humiliating to be scolded like that in the middle of the street, standing there as the old man lashed out at me, having to take it as people turned their heads to watch the uproar. Once or twice, I was tempted just to walk away and leave him there, but the fact was that Effing was not entirely wrong. I was not doing a very good job. I realized that I had never acquired the habit of looking closely at things, and now that I was being asked to do it, the results were dreadfully inadequate. Until then, I had always had a penchant for generalizing, for seeing the similarities between things rather than their differences. Now I was being plunged into a world of particulars, and the struggle to evoke them in words, to summon up the immediate sensual data, presented a challenge I was ill prepared for. To get what he wanted, Effing should have hired Flaubert to push him around the streets—but even Flaubert worked slowly, sometimes laboring for hours just to get a single sentence copy. I not only had to describe things accurately, I had to do it within a matter of seconds. More than anything else, I hated the inevitable comparisons with Pavel Shum. Once, when I was having a particularly rough time of it, Effing went on about his departed friend for several minutes, describing him as a master of the poetic phrase, a peerless inventor of apt and stunning images, a stylist whose words could miraculously reveal the palpable truth of objects. “And to think,” Effing said, “English wasn’t even his first language.” That was the only time I ever talked back to him on the subject, but I felt so wounded by his remark that I couldn’t resist. “If you want another language,” I said, “I’ll be happy to oblige you. How about Latin? I’ll talk to you in Latin from now on if you like. Better yet, I’ll talk to you in Pig Latin. You shouldn’t have any trouble understanding that.” It was a stupid thing to say, and Effing quickly put me in my place. “Shut up and talk, boy,” he said. “Tell me what the clouds look like. Give me every cloud in the western sky, every one as far as you can see.”

  In order to do what Effing asked, I had to learn how to keep myself separate from him. The essential thing was not to feel burdened by his commands, but to transform them into something I wanted to do for myself. There was nothing inherently wrong with the activity, after all. If regarded in the proper way, the effort to describe things accurately was precisely the kind of discipline that could teach me what I most wanted to learn: humility, patience, rigor. Instead of doing it merely to discharge an obligation, I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself how to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. I began to appreciate how great that distance was, to understand how far a thing must travel in order to get from the one place to the other. In actual terms, it was no more than two or three inches, but considering how many accidents and losses could occur along the way, it might just as well have been a journey from the earth to the moon. My first attempts with Effing were dismally vague, mere shadows flitting across a blurred background. I had seen these things before, I told myself, and how could there be any difficulty in describing them? A fire hydrant, a taxi cab, a rush of steam pouring up from the pavement—they were deeply familiar to me, and I felt I knew them by heart. But that did not take into account the mutability of those things, the way they changed according to the force and angle of the light, the way their aspect could be altered by what was happening around them: a person walking by, a sudden gust of wind, an odd reflection. Everything was constantly in flux, and though two bricks in a wall might strongly resemble each other, they could never be construed as identical. More to the point, the same brick was never really the same. It was wearing out, imperceptibly crumbling under the effects of the atmosphere, the cold, the heat, the storms that attacked it, and eventually, if one could watch it over the course of centuries, it would no longer be there. All inanimate things were disintegrating, all living things were dying. My head would start to throb whenever I thought of this, imagining the furious and hectic motions of molecules, the unceasing explosions of matter, the collisions, the chaos boiling under the surface of all things. As Effing had warned me at our first meeting: take nothing for granted. From casual indifference, I passed through a stage of intense alarm. My descriptions became overly exact, desperately trying to capture every possible nuance of what I was seeing, jumbling up details in a mad scramble to leave nothing out. The words burst from my mouth like machine-gun bullets, a staccato of rapid-fire assault. Effing constantly had to tell me to slow down, complaining that he couldn’t keep up with me. The problem was less in my delivery than in my general approach. I was piling too many words on top of each other, and rather than reveal the thing before us, they were in fact obscuring it, burying it under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions. The important thing to remember was that Effing was blind. My job was not to exhaust him with lengthy catalogues, but to help him see things for himself. In the end, the words didn’t matter. Their task was to enable him to apprehend the objects as quickly as possible, and in order to do that, I had to make them disappear the moment they were pronounced. It took me weeks of hard work to simplify my sentences, to learn how to separate the extraneous from the essential. I discovered that the more air I left around a thing, the happier the results, for that allowed Effing to do the crucial work on his own: to construct an image on the basis of a few hints, to feel his own mind traveling toward the thing I was describing for him. Disgusted by my early performances, I took to practicing when I was alone, lying in bed at night, for example, and going around the objects in the room, seeing if I couldn’t get any better at it. The harder I worked, the more serious I became about what I was doing. I no longer saw it as an aesthetic activity but as a moral one, and I began to be less irritated by Effing’s criticisms, wondering if his impatience and dissatisfaction could not eventually serve some higher purpose. I was a monk seeking illumination, and Effing was my hair shirt, the whip I flayed myself with. I don’t think there was any question that I improved, but that does not mean I was ever entirely satisfied with my efforts. The demands of words are too great for that; one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success. As time went on, Effing became more tolerant of my descriptions, but I can’t say whether that meant they were really any closer to what he wanted. Perhaps he had given up hope, or perhaps he was beginning to lose interest. It was difficult for me to know. In the end, it could be that he was simply getting used to me.

  During the winter, we generally confined our walks to the immediate neighborhood. West End Avenue, Broadway, the cross streets in the Seventies and Eighties. Many of the people we passed recognized Effing, and contrary to what I would have thought, they acted as though they were glad to see him. Some even stopped to say hello. Greengrocers, news vendors, old people out on walks of their own. Effing knew them all by the sound of their voices, and he spoke to them in a courteous if somewhat distant
manner: a nobleman who had come down from his castle to mingle with the people of the village. He seemed to command their respect, and in the early weeks there was much talk about Pavel Shum, a person they had all apparently known and liked. The story of his death was common knowledge in the neighborhood (some had even witnessed the accident), and Effing endured many earnest handshakes and offers of condolence, taking the attention perfectly in stride. It was remarkable how elegantly he could act when he wanted to, how deeply he seemed to understand the conventions of public behavior. “This is my new man,” he would say, gesturing in my direction, “Mr. M. S. Fogg, a recent graduate of Columbia University.” All very proper and correct, as though I were some distinguished person who had torn myself away from numerous other commitments to honor him with my presence. The same turnabout also held true in the pastry shop on Seventy-second Street where we sometimes went for a cup of tea before heading home. Not one dribble or slurp, not one noise ever escaped his lips. When strangers were watching him, Effing was an absolute gentleman, an impressive model of decorum.

  It was difficult to do much talking when we were out on these excursions. We were both turned in the same direction, and with my head so much higher than his, Effing’s words tended to get lost before they ever reached my ears. I would have to lean down to hear what he was saying, and because he didn’t like it when we stopped or slackened our pace, he would hold onto his comments until we had come to a corner and were waiting to cross the street. When he wasn’t asking me for descriptions, Effing rarely went beyond short statements and questions. What street is this? What time is it? I’m getting cold. There were days when he barely uttered a word from beginning to end, abandoning himself to the motion of the wheelchair as it rolled along the sidewalk, his face turned up to the sun, moaning softly to himself in a trance of physical pleasure. Effing loved to feel the air against his skin, to wallow in the invisible light that came pouring down around him, and on the days when I was able to keep a steady rhythm to our progress, synchronizing my steps to the turning of the wheels, I could feel him gradually subside into the music of it, lolling back like an infant in a stroller.

  In late March and early April, we began taking longer walks, leaving upper Broadway behind us and branching out into other neighborhoods. In spite of the warmer temperatures, Effing continued to bundle himself up in heavy outergarments, and even on the balmiest days he refused to tackle the outdoors without first putting on his overcoat and wrapping a plaid blanket around his legs. This sensitivity to the weather was so pronounced, it was as if he feared his very insides would be exposed if he didn’t take drastic measures to protect them. As long as he was warm, however, he welcomed contact with the air, and there was nothing like a good stiff breeze to bcopyen his spirits. When the wind blew on him, he would inevitably laugh and start cursing, making a great fuss about it as he shook his stick at the elements. Even in the winter, his preferred haunt was Riverside Park, and he spent many hours sitting there in silence, never dozing off as I expected he would, but just listening, trying to follow the things that were going on around him: the birds and squirrels rustling among the leaves and twigs, the wind fluttering through the branches, the sounds of traffic on the highway below. I began carrying a nature guide with me on these trips to the park so that I could look up the names of shrubs and flowers when he asked me what they were. I learned to identify dozens of plants in this way, examining leaves and bud formations with an interest and curiosity I had never felt for these things before. Once, when Effing was in a particularly receptive mood, I asked him why he didn’t live in the country. It was still rather early at that point, I think, late November or the beginning of December, and I hadn’t yet grown afraid of asking him questions. The park seemed to give him such pleasure, I said, it was a pity he couldn’t be surrounded by nature all the time. He waited a long moment before answering me, so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard the question. “I’ve already done it,” he said at last. “I’ve done it, and now it’s all in my head. All alone in the middle of nowhere, living in the wilderness for months, for months and months … an entire lifetime. Once you’ve done that, boy, you never forget it. I don’t need to go anywhere. The moment I start to think about it, I’m back. That’s where I spend most of my time these days—back in the middle of nowhere.”

  In mid-December, Effing suddenly lost interest in travel books. We had read close to a dozen by then and were plodding our way through A Canyon Voyage by Frederick S. Dellenbaugh (a narrative of Powell’s second expedition down the Colorado) when he stopped me in the middle of a sentence and announced: “I think we’ve had enough, Mr. Fogg. It’s getting rather tedious, and we don’t have any time to waste. There’s work to be done, business to take care of.”

  I had no idea what business he was referring to, but I gladly put the book back on the shelf and waited for his instructions. They turned out to be something of a disappointment. “Go down to the corner,” he said, “and buy a copy of The New York Times. Mrs. Hume will give you the money.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all. And make it fast. There’s no more time for dawdling.”

  Until then, Effing had not shown the slightest interest in following the news. Mrs. Hume and I would sometimes talk about it at meals, but the old man had never joined in, had never so much as offered a comment. But now that was the only thing he wanted, and for the next two weeks I spent every morning diligently reading articles to him from The New York Times. Reports from the Vietnam War dominated, but he asked to hear about any number of things as well: congressional debates, three-alarm fires in Brooklyn, stabbings in the Bronx, stockmarket listings, book reviews, basketball scores, earthquakes. None of this seemed to tally with the urgent tone he had used in sending me out for the paper the first time. Effing was clearly up to something, but I was hard-pressed to imagine what it was. He was coming to it obliquely, circling around his intentions in a slow game of cat and mouse. No doubt he was trying to confuse me, but at the same time these strategies were so transparent, it was as if he were telling me to be on my guard.

  We always ended up our morning news sessions with a thorough scanning of the obituary pages. These seemed to hold Effing’s attention more firmly than the other articles, and I was sometimes astonished to see how closely he listened to the colorless prose of these accounts. Captains of industry, politicians, flagpole sitters, inventors, stars of the silent screen: they all engaged his curiosity in equal measure. Days passed, and little by little we began to devote more of each session to the obituaries. He made me read through some of the stories two or three times, and on days when deaths were sparse, he would ask me to read the paid announcements that appeared in fine print at the bottom of the page. George So-and-So, age sixty-nine, beloved husband and father, mourned by his family and friends, will be laid to rest this afternoon at one o’clock in Our Lady of Sorrows Cemetery. Effing never seemed to tire of these dull recitations. Finally, after almost two weeks of saving them for the end, he abandoned the pretense of wanting to hear the news at all and asked me to turn to the obituary page first. I said nothing about this change of order, but once we had studied the deaths and he did not ask me to read anything else, I realized that we had at last come to a turning point.

  “We know what they sound like now, don’t we, boy?” he said.

  “I suppose we do,” I answered. “We’ve certainly read enough of them to get the general drift.”

  “It’s depressing, I admit. But I felt a little research was in order before we started on our project.”

  “Our project?”

  “My turn is coming. Any numbskull can see that.”

  “I don’t expect you to live forever, sir. But you’ve outlived most people already, and there’s no reason to think you won’t go on doing it for a long time to come.”

  “Perhaps. But if I’m mistaken, it would be the first time in my life I’ve ever been wrong.”

  “You’re saying you know.”

>   “That’s copy, I know. A hundred little signs have told me. I’m running out of time, and we’ve got to get started before it’s too late.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “My obituary. We have to start putting it together now.”

  “I’ve never heard of someone writing his own obituary. Other people are supposed to do it for you—after you’re dead.”

  “When they have the facts, yes. But what happens when there’s nothing in the file?”

  “I see your point. You want to gather together some basic information.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what makes you think they’ll want to print it?”

  “They printed it fifty-two years ago. I don’t see why they won’t jump at the chance to do it again.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I was dead. They don’t print obituaries of living people, do they? I was dead, or at least they thought I was dead.”

  “And you didn’t say anything about it?”

  “I didn’t want to. I liked being dead, and after it got written up in the papers, I was able to stay dead.”

  “You must have been someone important.”

  “I was very important.”

  “Why haven’t I ever heard of you, then?”

  “I used to have another name. I got rid of it after I died.”

  “What was it?”

  “A sissy name. Julian Barber. I always detested it.”