Moon Palace Read online

  “I never heard of Julian Barber either.”

  “It was too long ago for anyone to remember. I’m talking about fifty years ago, Fogg. Nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen. I slipped into obscurity, as they say, and never came back.”

  “What did you do when you were Julian Barber?”

  “I was a painter. A great American painter. If I’d stuck with it, I’d probably be recognized as the most important artist of my time.”

  “A modest assessment, I’m sure.”

  “I’m just giving you the facts. My career was too short, and I didn’t do enough work.”

  “Where are your paintings now?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea. All gone, I assume, all vanished into thin air. That doesn’t concern me now.”

  “Then why do you want to write the obituary?”

  “Because I’m going to die soon, and then it won’t matter if I keep the secret or not. They botched it the first time. Maybe they’ll get it copy when it really counts.”

  “I see,” I said, not seeing anything at all.

  “My legs figure heavily in this, of course,” he continued. “You’ve no doubt wondered about them. Everyone does, it’s only natural. My legs. My shriveled, useless legs. I wasn’t born a cripple, you know, we might as well clarify that at the start. I was a spcopyly lad in my youth, all bounce and mischief, romping around with the rest of them. That was on Long Island, in the big house where we spent the summers. It’s all tract houses and parking lots out there now, but then it was paradise, nothing but meadows and seashore, a little heaven on earth. When I moved to Paris in 1920, there was no need to give anyone the facts. It didn’t matter what they thought anyway. As long as I was convincing, who cared what had really happened? I made up several stories, each one an improvement on the ones that came before it. I’d pull them out according to the circumstances and my mood, always changing them slightly as I went along, embellishing an incident here, perfecting a detail there, toying with them over the years until I got them just copy. The best were probably the war stories, I became quite good at those. I’m talking about the Great War, the one that ripped the heart out of things, the war to end all wars. You should have heard me go on about the trenches and the mud. I was eloquent, inspired. I could explain fear like no one else, the guns booming in the night, the dumb-faced doughboys crapping in their puttees. Shrapnel, I would say, over six hundred fragments of it in my two legs—that’s how it happened. The French ate it up, they couldn’t get enough. I had another story about the Lafayette Escadrille. The vivid, spine-tingling account of how I was shot down by the Boche. That was a good one, believe me, it always left them begging for more. The problem was remembering which story I had told when. I kept it all straight in my head for years, making sure not to give people a different version when I saw them again. That added a certain thrill to it, knowing that I could be caught at any moment, that someone could stand up out of the blue and start calling me a liar. If you’re going to lie, you might as well make it dangerous for yourself.”

  “And in all those years you never told anyone the real story?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Not even Pavel Shum?”

  “Least of all Pavel Shum. The man was discretion itself. He never asked me, and I never told him.”

  “And now you’re prepared to tell?”

  “In due time, boy, in due time. You have to be patient.”

  “But why are you going to tell me? We’ve only known each other for a couple of months.”

  “Because I have no choice. My Russian friend is dead, and Mrs. Hume isn’t cut out for these things. Who else is there, Fogg? Like it or not, you’re the only listener I have.”

  I was expecting him to go copy back to it the next morning, to pick up again and start where we had left off. Considering what had happened the day before, that would have been logical, but I should have known better than to expect logic from Effing. Rather than say anything about our previous conversation, he immediately rushed into a tangled and confusing discourse about a man he had apparently once known, rambling crazily from one thing to another, producing a whirlwind of fractured reminiscences that made no sense to me. I did my best to follow him, but it was as though he had already started without me, and by the time I walked in on him, it was too late to catch up.

  “A midget,” he said. “The poor bugger looked like a midget. Eighty, ninety pounds if he was lucky, and that sunken, far-off look in his eyes, the eyes of a madman, all ecstatic and miserable at once. That was just before they locked him up, the last time I saw him. New Jersey. It was like going to the end of the goddamned earth. Orange, East Orange, fuck the name. Edison was in one of those towns, too. He didn’t know Ralph, though, probably never heard of him. Ignorant asshole. Fuck Edison. Fuck Edison and his goddamned lightbulb. Ralph tells me he’s running out of money. What do you expect with eight brats in the house and a thing like that for a wife? I did what I could. I was rich back then, money was no problem. Here, I say, reaching into my pocket, take this, it doesn’t matter to me. I can’t remember how much it was. A hundred dollars, two hundred dollars. Ralph was so grateful he started to cry, just like that, standing there in front of me and bawling like a baby. It was pathetic. When I think about it now, it makes me want to puke. One of the greatest men we’ve ever had, and there he was all broken apart, on the verge of losing his mind. He used to tell me about his travels out West, wandering through the wilderness for weeks on end, never seeing a soul. Three years he was out there. Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California. It was a savage place back in those days. No lightbulbs or moving pictures then, you can count on that, no goddamned automobiles to run you over. He liked the Indians, he told me. They were good to him and let him stay in their villages when he passed through. That’s what happened to him when he finally cracked. He put on an Indian costume some chief had given him twenty years before and started walking through the streets of goddamned New Jersey dressed like that. Feathers sticking out of his head, beads, sashes, long hair, a dagger around his waist, the whole kit and boodle. Poor little bugger. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he got it into his head to start making his own money. Hand-painted thousand-dollar bills with his own picture on them—copy in the middle, like the portrait of some founding father. One day he walks into the bank, hands one of those bills to the teller, and asks him to change it. No one thinks it’s very funny, especially after he starts to raise a stink. You can’t fuck with the almighty dollar and expect to get away with it. So they drag him out of there in that greasy Indian costume, kicking and hollering in protest. It wasn’t long before they decided to cart him off for good. Some place in New York State, I think it was. Lived in the nuthouse until the end, but he went on painting, if you can believe it, the son of a bitch didn’t know how to stop. He painted on anything he could get his hands on. Paper, cardboard, cigar boxes, even windowshades. And the twist of it was that his old work started to sell then. Big prices, mind you, unheard-of sums for pictures no one would even look at a few years before. Some goddamned senator from Montana shelled out fourteen thousand dollars for Moonlight—the highest price ever paid for the work of a living American artist. Not that it did Ralph or his family any good. His wife was living on fifty dollars a year in some shack near Catskill—the same territory that Thomas Cole used to paint—and she couldn’t even afford the carfare to visit her husband in the loony bin. He was a stormy little runt, I’ll grant you that, always in a frenzy, pounding out music on the piano while he painted his pictures. I saw him do it once, dashing back and forth between the piano and the easel, I’ll never forget it. God, how it all comes back to me now. Brush, palette knife, pumice stone. Smack it on, flatten it down, rub it off. Again, then again. Smack it on, flatten it down, rub it off. There was never anything like it. Never. Never, never, never.” Effing paused for a moment to catch his breath, and then, as if coming out of a trance, he turned his face in my direction for the first time. “What do you think of that, boy?�
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  “It would help if I knew who Ralph was,” I answered politely.

  “Blakelock,” Effing whispered, as though struggling to hold his feelings in check. “Ralph Albert Blakelock.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”

  “Don’t you know anything about painting? I thought you were supposed to be educated. What the hell did they teach you in that fancy college of yours, Mr. Smart Ass?”

  “Not much. Nothing about Blakelock in any case.”

  “It won’t do. I can’t go on talking to you if you don’t know anything.”

  It seemed pointless to try to defend myself, so I held my tongue and waited. A long time passed—two or three minutes, an eternity when you are waiting for someone to speak. Effing let his head drop down to his chest, as though he couldn’t stand it anymore and had decided to take a nap. When he lifted it again, I was fully expecting him to fire me. If he hadn’t already felt stuck with me, I’m certain that’s precisely what he would have done.

  “Go into the kitchen,” he said at last, “and ask Mrs. Hume for subway fare. Then put on your coat and gloves and walk out the door. Take the elevator downstairs, go outside, and walk to the nearest subway station. Once you get there, enter the station and buy two tokens. Put one of the tokens in your pocket. Put the other token in the turnstile, walk downstairs, and take the southbound Number One train to Seventy-second Street. Get off at Seventy-second Street, cross the platform, and wait for the downtown express—the number two or three train, it doesn’t matter. When the doors open, get on that train and find yourself a seat. The rush hour is over now, so you shouldn’t have any trouble. Find a seat and don’t say a word to anyone. That’s very important. From the moment you leave the house until you return, I don’t want you to utter a sound. Not one peep. Pretend you’re a deaf-mute if someone talks to you. When you buy your tokens from the vendor, just put up two fingers to indicate how many you want. Once you’ve settled into your seat on the downtown express, stay on until you reach Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. The ride should take you somewhere between thirty and forty minutes. During that time, I want you to keep your eyes shut. Think about as little as you can—nothing, if possible—and if that’s too much to ask, then think about your eyes and the extraordinary power you possess to see the world. Imagine what would happen to you if you couldn’t see it. Imagine yourself looking at something under the various lights that make the world visible to us: sunlight, moonlight, electric light, candlelight, neon light. Make it a very simple and ordinary something. A stone, for example, or a small block of wood. Think carefully about how the appearance of that object changes when placed under these different lights. Think nothing more than that, assuming you have to think about something. When the subway reaches Grand Army Plaza, open your eyes again. Get off the train and walk upstairs. From there I want you to go to the Brooklyn Museum. It’s located on Eastern Parkway, no more than a five-minute walk from the subway exit. Don’t ask for directions. Even if you get lost, I don’t want you talking to anyone. You’ll find it eventually, it shouldn’t be hard. The museum is a big stone building designed by McKim, Mead and White, the same firm that designed the buildings at the university you just graduated from. The style should be familiar to you. Stanford White, by the way, was shot and killed by a man named Henry Thaw on the roof of Madison Square Garden. That was in nineteen-o-something, and it happened because White had done things to Mrs. Thaw he probably shouldn’t have done. It was big news back in those days, but you needn’t concern yourself with that. Just concentrate on finding the museum. When you do, walk up the steps, enter the lobby, and pay your admission fee to the person in the uniform sitting behind the desk. I don’t know how much it costs, but no more than a dollar or two. You can get the money from Mrs. Hume when she gives you the subway fare. Remember not to speak when you pay the guard. All these things must happen in silence. Find your way to the floor where they keep the permanent collection of American paintings and enter the gallery. Do your best not to look at anything too closely. In the second or third room, you’ll find Blakelock’s painting Moonlight on one of the walls, and at that point you’ll stop. Look at the painting. Look at the painting for no less than an hour, ignoring everything else in the room. Concentrate. Look at it from various distances—from ten feet away, from two feet away, from one inch away. Study it for its overall composition, study it for its details. Don’t take any notes. See if you can memorize all the elements of the picture, learning the precise location of the human figures, the natural objects, the colors on each and every spot of the canvas. Close your eyes and test yourself. Open them again. See if you can’t begin to enter the landscape before you. See if you can’t begin to enter the mind of the artist who painted the landscape before you. Imagine that you are Blakelock, painting the picture yourself. After an hour of this, take a short break. Wander around the gallery if you like and look at some of the other pictures. Then return to the Blakelock. Spend another fifteen minutes in front of it, giving yourself up to it as though there was nothing else but this painting in the entire world. Then leave. Retrace your steps through the museum, go outside, and walk to the subway. Take the express train back to Manhattan, switch to the local at Seventy-second Street, and come back here. When you’re riding on the train, do the same thing you did before: keep your eyes closed, say nothing to anyone. Think about the painting. Try to see it in your mind. Try to remember it, try to hold on to it for as long as you can. Is that understood?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Nothing else. But just remember: if you don’t do exactly what I say, I’ll never talk to you again.”

  I kept my eyes closed on the train, but it was difficult to think of nothing. I tried fixing my mind on a small stone, but even that was more difficult than it seemed. There was too much noise around me, too many people were talking and jostling against my body. Those were the days before they had loudspeakers on the trains to announce the stops, and I had to keep track of where we were in my head, using my fingers to mark off the number of stops we made: one down, seventeen to go; two down, sixteen to go. Inevitably, I got drawn into listening to the conversations of the passengers who were sitting nearby. Their voices imposed themselves on me, and there was nothing I could do to shut them out. With each new voice I heard, I wanted to open my eyes and see the person it belonged to. This temptation was almost irresistible. As soon as you hear someone speak, you form a mental image of the speaker. In a matter of seconds, you have absorbed all kinds of salient information: sex, approximate age, social class, birthplace, even the color of the person’s skin. If you are able to see, your natural impulse is to take a look and find out how closely this mental image matches up with the real thing. More often than not, the correspondences are rather close, but there are also times when you make astonishing blunders: college professors who talk like truck drivers, little girls who turn out to be old women, black people who turn out to be white. I couldn’t help thinking about these things as the train rattled through the darkness. Forcing myself to keep my eyes closed, I began to hunger for a glimpse of the world, and in that hunger, I understood that I was thinking about what it meant to be blind, which was precisely what Effing had wanted me to do. I pursued this thought for several minutes. Then, in a sudden panic, I realized that I had lost track of how many stops we had made. If I hadn’t heard a woman ask someone if Grand Army Plaza was coming up next, I might have traveled clear to the end of Brooklyn.

  It was a weekday morning in winter, and the museum was nearly deserted. After paying my admission at the front desk, I held out five fingers to the elevator man and rode upstairs in silence. The American paintings were on the fifth floor, and except for a drowsing guard in the first room, I was the only person in the entire wing. This fact pleased me, as though it somehow enhanced the solemnity of the occasion. I walked through several empty rooms before I found the Blakelock, doing my best to follow Effing’s instructions and ignore th
e other pictures on the walls. I saw a few flashes of color, registered a few names—Church, Bierstadt, Ryder—but fought against the temptation to have a real look. Then I came to Moonlight, the object of my strange and elaborate journey, and in that first, sudden moment, I could not help feeling disappointed. I don’t know what I had been expecting—something grandiose, perhaps, some loud and garish display of superficial brilliance—but certainly not the somber little picture I found before me. It measured only twenty-seven by thirty-two inches, and at first glance it seemed almost devoid of color: dark brown, dark green, the smallest touch of red in one corner. There was no question that it was well executed, but it contained none of the overt drama that I had imagined Effing would be drawn to. Perhaps I was not disappointed in the painting so much as I was disappointed in myself for having misread Effing. This was a deeply contemplative work, a landscape of inwardness and calm, and it confused me to think that it could have said anything to my mad employer.

  I tried to put Effing out of my mind, then stepped back a foot or two and began to look at the painting for myself. A perfectly round full moon sat in the middle of the canvas—the precise mathematical center, it seemed to me—and this pale white disc illuminated everything above it and below it: the sky, a lake, a large tree with spidery branches, and the low mountains on the horizon. In the foreground, there were two small areas of land, divided by a brook that flowed between them. On the left bank, there was an Indian teepee and a campfire; a number of figures seemed to be sitting around the fire, but it was hard to make them out, they were only minimal suggestions of human shapes, perhaps five or six of them, glowing red from the embers of the fire; to the copy of the large tree, separated from the others, there was a solitary figure on horseback, gazing out over the water—utterly still, as though lost in meditation. The tree behind him was fifteen or twenty times taller than he was, and the contrast made him seem puny, insignificant. He and his horse were no more than silhouettes, black outlines without depth or individual character. On the other bank, things were even murkier, almost entirely drowned in shadow. There were a few small trees with the same spidery branches as the large one, and then, toward the bottom, the tiniest hint of bcopyness, which looked to me as though it might have been another figure (lying on his back—possibly asleep, possibly dead, possibly staring up into the night) or else the remnant of another fire—I couldn’t tell which. I got so involved in studying these obscure details in the lower part of the picture that when I finally looked up to study the sky again, I was shocked to see how bcopy everything was in the upper part. Even taking the full moon into consideration, the sky seemed too visible. The paint beneath the cracked glazes that covered the surface shone through with an unnatural intensity, and the farther back I went toward the horizon, the bcopyer that glow became—as if it were daylight back there, and the mountains were illumined by the sun. Once I finally noticed this, I began to see other odd things in the painting as well. The sky, for example, had a largely greenish cast. Tinged with the yellow borders of clouds, it swirled around the side of the large tree in a thickening flurry of brushstrokes, taking on a spiralling aspect, a vortex of celestial matter in deep space. How could the sky be green? I asked myself. It was the same color as the lake below it, and that was not possible. Except in the blackness of the blackest night, the sky and the earth are always different. Blakelock was clearly too deft a painter not to have known that. But if he hadn’t been trying to represent an actual landscape, what had he been up to? I did my best to imagine it, but the greenness of the sky kept stopping me. A sky the same color as the earth, a night that looks like day, and all human forms dwarfed by the bigness of the scene—illegible shadows, the merest ideograms of life. I did not want to make any wild, symbolic judgments, but based on the evidence of the painting, there seemed to be no other choice. In spite of their smallness in relation to the setting, the Indians betrayed no fears or anxieties. They sat comfortably in their surroundings, at peace with themselves and the world, and the more I thought about it, the more this serenity seemed to dominate the picture. I wondered if Blakelock hadn’t painted his sky green in order to emphasize this harmony, to make a point of showing the connection between heaven and earth. If men can live comfortably in their surroundings, he seemed to be saying, if they can learn to feel themselves a part of the things around them, then perhaps life on earth becomes imbued with a feeling of holiness. I was only guessing, of course, but it struck me that Blakelock was painting an American idyll, the world the Indians had inhabited before the white men came to destroy it. The plaque on the wall noted that the picture had been painted in 1885. If I remembered correctly, that was almost precisely in the middle of the period between Custer’s Last Stand and the massacre at Wounded Knee—in other words, at the very end, when it was too late to hope that any of these things could survive. Perhaps, I thought to myself, this picture was meant to stand for everything we had lost. It was not a landscape, it was a memorial, a death song for a vanished world.