Moon Palace Page 17

  “I was back in New York, and Pavel and I started taking walks around the city. The same as we do now, pushing the wheelchair, pausing to look at things, but much longer, we’d keep going for the whole day. It was the first time Pavel had been in New York, and I showed him the sights, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to reacquaint myself with it in the process. One day in the summer of thirty-nine, we visited the Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth, then stopped for a breather in Bryant Park. That’s when I saw Tesla again. Pavel was sitting on a bench beside me, and just ten or twelve feet away from us there was this old man feeding the pigeons. He was standing up, and the birds were fluttering all around him, landing on his head and arms, dozens of cooing pigeons, shitting on his clothes and eating out of his hands, and the old man kept talking to them, calling the birds his darlings, his sweethearts, his angels. The moment I heard that voice, I knew it was Tesla, and then he turned his face in my direction, and there he was. An eighty-year-old man. Spectral white, thin, as ugly to look at as I am now. I wanted to laugh when I saw him. The one-time genius from outer space, the hero of my youth. He was nothing but a broken-down old man now, a bum. You’re Nikola Tesla, I said to him. Just like that, I didn’t stand on formality. You’re Nikola Tesla, I said, I used to know you. He smiled at me and made a little bow. I’m busy at the moment, he said, perhaps we can talk some other time. I turned to Pavel and said, Give Mr. Tesla some money, Pavel, he can probably use it to buy more birdseed. Pavel stood up, walked over to Tesla, and held out a ten-dollar bill to him. It was a moment for the ages, Fogg, a moment that can never be equaled. Ha! I’ll never forget the confusion in that son of a bitch’s eyes. Mr. Tomorrow, the prophet of a new world! Pavel held out the ten-dollar bill to him, and I could see him struggling to ignore it, to tear his eyes away from the money—but he couldn’t do it. He just stood there, staring at it like some insane beggar. And then he took the money, just snatched it out of Pavel’s hand and shoved it into his pocket. That’s very kind of you, he said to me, very kind. The little darlings need every morsel they can get. Then he turned his back to us and muttered something to the birds. Pavel wheeled me away at that point, and that was the end of it. I never saw him again.”

  Effing paused for several moments, savoring the memory of his cruelty. Then, in a more subdued tone, he started in again. “I’m getting on with it, boy,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. Just keep the pen moving, and we’ll be all copy. In the end, everything will get said, everything will come out. I was talking about Long Island, wasn’t I? About Thomas Moran and how the business got started. You see, I haven’t forgotten. Just keep writing down the words. There won’t be any obituary unless you write down the words.

  “Moran was the one who talked me into it. He’d been out West in the seventies, he’d seen the whole place from top to bottom. He didn’t travel alone the way Ralph did, of course, wandering through the wilderness like some benighted pilgrim, he wasn’t, how shall I say, he wasn’t on the same kind of quest. Moran did it in style. He was the official artist for the Hayden expedition in seventy-one, and then he went back out there with Powell in seventy-three. We read Powell’s book a couple of months ago, all the illustrations in it were by Moran. Remember the picture of Powell dangling over the edge of the cliff, hanging on for dear life with his one arm? Good stuff, you have to admit, the old man knew how to draw. Moran got famous for what he did out there, he was the one who showed Americans what the West looked like. The first painting of the Grand Canyon was by Moran, it’s hanging in the Capitol building in Washington; the first painting of Yellowstone, the first painting of the Great Salt Desert, the first paintings of the canyon country in southern Utah—they were all done by Moran. Manifest Destiny! They mapped it out, they made pictures of it, they digested it into the great American profit machine. Those were the last bits of the continent, the blank spaces no one had explored. Now here it was, all laid out on a pretty piece of canvas for everyone to see. The golden spike, driven copy through our hearts!

  “I wasn’t a painter like Moran, you shouldn’t get that idea. I was part of the new generation, and I didn’t hold with any of that romantic bullshit. I’d been to Paris back in o-six and o-seven, and I knew what was going on. The Fauves, the Cubists, I got wind of that stuff when I was young, and once you get a taste of the future, there’s no turning back. I knew the crowd over at Stieglitz’s gallery on Fifth Avenue, we used to go out drinking together and talk about art. They liked my work, they touted me as one of the new hotshots. Marin, Dove, Demuth, Man Ray, there wasn’t anyone I didn’t know. I was a cunning little devil back then, my head was full of smart ideas. Everyone talks about the Armory Show now, but that was old news for me by the time it happened. Still, I was different from most of the others. The line didn’t interest me. Mechanical abstraction, the canvas as the world, intellectual art—I saw it as a dead end. I was a colorist, and my subject was space, pure space and light: the force of light when it hits the eye. I still worked from nature, and that’s the reason why I enjoyed talking to someone like Moran. He was the old guard, but he’d been influenced by Turner, and we had that in common, along with a passion for landscape, a passion for the real world. Moran kept talking to me about the West. If you don’t go out there, he said, you’ll never understand what space is. Your work will stop growing if you don’t make the trip. You’ve got to experience that sky, it will change your life. On and on, always the same thing. He kept at it every time I saw him, and after a while I finally said to myself, why not, it won’t hurt me to go out there and see it.

  “It was 1916. I was thirty-three years old and had been married for about four years. Of all the things I’ve ever done, that marriage ranks as my worst mistake. Elizabeth Wheeler was her name. She was from a rich family, so she didn’t marry me for my money, but she might just as well have, considering the way things were between us. It didn’t take me long to find out the truth. She wept like a schoolgirl on our wedding night, and after that the gates slammed shut. Oh, I stormed the castle every now and then, but more from anger than anything else. Just to let her know she couldn’t get away with it all the time. Even now, I wonder what possessed me to marry her. Perhaps her face was too pretty, perhaps her body was too round and plump, I don’t know. They were all virgins when they got married in those days, I thought she would learn to like it. But it never got any better, the whole thing was tears and struggle, fits of screaming, disgust. She took me for a beast, an agent of the devil. A pox on that frigid bitch! She should have lived in a convent. I showed her the darkness and uncleanliness that keep the world going, and she never forgave me for it. Homo erectus, it was nothing but horror to her: the mystery of male flesh. Once she finally saw what happens to it, she fell apart. I won’t go on about this. It’s an old story, I’m sure you’ve heard it before. I found my pleasures elsewhere. There was no lack of opportunity, I assure you, my cock never suffered from neglect. I was a dapper young gentleman, money was no object, my groin was constantly ablaze. Ha! I wish we had time to talk about some of that. The pulsing quims I’ve inhabited, the adventures of my middle leg. The other two might be defunct, but their baby brother has kept up a life of his own. Even now, Fogg, if you can believe it. The little man has never quit.

  “All copy, all copy, enough. It’s not important. I’m just giving you the background, trying to set the scene. If you need an explanation for what happened, my marriage to Elizabeth will help. I’m not saying it was the sole cause, but it was certainly a factor. When the situation presented itself to me, I had no regrets about vanishing. I saw my chance to be dead, and I took it.

  “I didn’t plan it that way. Three or four months, I thought, and then I’d come back. The New York crowd thought I was crazy to go out there, they couldn’t see the point. Go to Europe, they said to me, there’s nothing to learn in America. I explained my reasons to them, and just talking about it got me more and more excited. I threw myself into the preparations, I couldn’t wait to be
off. Early on, I decided to take someone along with me, a young fellow by the name of Edward Byrne—Teddy, as his parents called him. His father was a friend of mine, and he talked me into including the lad. I had no serious objections. I thought I would welcome the companionship, and Byrne was a spirited boy, I’d been out sailing with him a couple of times, and I knew that he had a good head on his shoulders. Steadfast, quick to learn, a strong and athletic young man of eighteen or nineteen. His dream was to become a topographer, he wanted to catch on with the U.S. Geological Survey and spend his life tramping around the great outdoors. It was that kind of age, Fogg. Teddy Roosevelt, handlebar mustaches, all that manly bluster. Byrne’s father bought him a mess of equipment—sextant, compass, theodolite, the whole works—and I got myself enough art supplies to last me a couple of years. Pencils, charcoals, pastels, paints, brushes, rolls of canvas, paper—I was counting on getting a lot of work done. Moran’s talk had sunk in by then, and I was expecting great things from the trip. I was going to do my best work out there, and I didn’t want to get caught short of materials.

  “For all her stoniness in bed, Elizabeth began to have qualms about my going away. As the time approached for me to leave, she grew more and more unhappy about it: bursting into tears, imploring me to call off the trip. I still don’t understand it. You’d think she would have been glad to get rid of me. An unpredictable woman she was, always doing the opposite of what you’d expect. On the last night before I left, she even went so far as to make the supreme sacrifice. I think she got herself a little tipsy first—you know, to buck up her courage—and then she actually went ahead and offered herself to me. Arms open, eyes closed, as if she were some bloody martyr. I’ll never forget it. Oh, Julian, she kept saying, oh, my darling husband. Like most crazy people, she probably knew what was going to happen in advance, she probably sensed that things were about to change for good. I did it to her that night—it was my duty, after all—but I didn’t let it stop me from leaving the next day. As it happened, it was the last time I ever saw her. So be it. I’m just giving you the facts, you can make of them what you will. There were consequences from that night, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them, but a long time passed before I knew what they were. Thirty years, in fact, a whole lifetime into the future. Consequences. That’s the way it is, boy. There are always consequences, whether you like it or not.

  “Byrne and I went by train. Chicago, Denver, all the way to Salt Lake City. It was an endless trip back in those days, and when we finally got out there, I felt that I’d been traveling for a year. It was April 1916. In Salt Lake, we found a man to serve as our guide, but later that same afternoon, if you can believe it, he burned his leg in a blacksmith’s shop, and we had to hire someone else. It was a bad omen, but you never think of those things at the time, you just go ahead and do what you have to do. The man we got was named Jack Scoresby. He was a former cavalry soldier, forty-eight, fifty years old, an old-timer in those parts, but people said he knew the territory well, he knew it as well as anyone else we could find. I had to take them at their word. The people I talked to were strangers, and they could have told me anything they wanted, it made no difference to them. I was just a greenhorn, a rich greenhorn from back East, and why should they give a good goddamn about me? That was how it happened, Fogg. There was no choice but to plunge in blindly and hope for the best.

  “I had my doubts about Scoresby from the start, but we were too eager to be off on our trek to waste any more time. He was a dirty little man with a snickering laugh, all whiskers and buffalo grease, but he talked a good game, I’ll grant him that. He promised to take us places where few men had ever been, that’s how he put it, he’d show us things that only God and Injuns had ever set eyes on before. You knew he was full of shit, but it was hard not to get excited anyway. We spread out a map on a table in the hotel and planned the route we’d be following. Scoresby seemed to know what he was talking about, and he kept making incidental comments and asides to show off his knowledge: how many horses and donkeys would be necessary, how to behave with Mormons, how to deal with the scarcity of water in the south. It was obvious that he thought we were fools. The idea of going out to gawk at scenery made no sense to him, and when I told him I was a painter, it was all he could do not to laugh. Still, we struck what seemed like a fair bargain, and the three of us shook hands on it. I figured that things would fall into place once we got to know each other.

  “The night before we left, Byrne and I sat up talking. He showed me his surveying equipment, and I remember being in one of those excited moods when everything suddenly seems to fit together in a new way. Byrne told me that you can’t fix your exact position on the earth without referring to some point in the sky. Something to do with triangulation, the technique of measurement, I forget the details. The crux was compelling to me, though, it’s never left me since. A man can’t know where he is on the earth except in relation to the moon or a star. Astronomy comes first; land maps follow because of it. Just the opposite of what you’d expect. If you think about it long enough, it will turn your brain inside-out. A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There’s this only because there’s that; if we don’t look up, we’ll never know what’s down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not. You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

  “I did some good work in the beginning. We headed due west from the city, camped out by the lake for a day or two, and then moved on into the Great Salt Desert. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The flattest, most desolate spot on the planet, a boneyard of oblivion. You travel along day after day, and you don’t see a goddamned thing. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a single blade of grass. Nothing but whiteness, cracked earth stretching into the distance on all sides. The ground tastes of salt, and way out at the edge, the horizon is ringed with mountains, a huge ring of mountains oscillating in the light. It makes you think you’re nearing water, surrounded by all that shimmer and glare, but it’s only an illusion. It’s a dead world, and the only thing you ever get closer to is more of the same nothing. God knows how many pioneers bogged down and gave up the ghost in that desert, you’d see their white bones jutting straight out of the ground. That’s what did in the Donner party, everyone knows about them. They got stuck in the salt, and by the time they reached the Sierra Mountains in California, the winter snows blocked their way, and they fell to eating each other to stay alive. Everyone knows that, it’s American folklore, but a true fact nevertheless, a true and unimpeachable fact. Wagon wheels, skullbones, empty bullet shells—I saw all those things out there, even as late as 1916. A giant cemetery was what it was, a blank page of death.

  “For the first couple of weeks, I drew like a fiend. Odd stuff, I’d never done work like that before. I hadn’t thought the scale would make a difference, but it did, there was no other way to wrestle with the size of things. The marks on the page became smaller and smaller, small to the point of vanishing. It was as if my hand had a life of its own. Just get it down, I kept saying to myself, just get it down, and don’t worry, you can think about it later. We stopped off in Wendover for a little while and got cleaned up, then crossed into Nevada and went south, traveling along the edge of the Confusion Range. Again, it all jumped out at me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. The mountains, the snow on top of the mountains, the clouds hovering around the snow. After a while, they began to merge together and I couldn’t tell them apart. Whiteness, and then more whiteness. How can you draw something if you don’t know it’s there? You see what I’m talking about, don’t you? It didn’t feel human anymore. The wind would blow so hard that you couldn’t hear yourself think, and then it would suddenly stop, and the air would be so still, you’d stand there wondering if you hadn’t gone deaf. Unearthly silence, Fogg. The only thing you could hear was your heart beating in your chest, the sound of blood rushing through your brain.

  “Scoresby didn’t make life any easier. He did h
is job, I suppose, leading us along, building fires, hunting for food, but his scorn for us never let up, bad will poured out of him and tainted the atmosphere. He sulked and spat, muttered under his breath, mocked us with his sullenness. After a while, Byrne got so wary of him that he wouldn’t talk when Scoresby was around. Scoresby would go off hunting while we did our work—young Teddy scrambling among the rocks and taking his measurements, I parked on some ledge or other with my paints and charcoals—but in the evenings the three of us would cook our dinner together in front of the campfire. Once, hoping to turn things around a little, I offered to play cards with Scoresby. He seemed to like the idea, but like most stupid men, he had an inflated notion of his own intelligence. He figured he was going to beat me and win a lot of money. Not only beat me at cards, but beat me in every way, really show me who was boss. We played blackjack, and all the cards came to me, he lost six or seven hands in a row. It shook his confidence, and then he started playing badly, making outrageous bets, trying to bluff me, doing everything wrong. I must have won fifty or sixty dollars from him that night, a fortune to a simpleton like that. When I saw how upset he was, I tried to undo the damage and called off the debt. What did I care about the money? Don’t worry about it, I said to him, I just got lucky, I’m willing to forget it, no hard feelings, something along those lines. It was probably the worst thing I could have said. Scoresby thought I was patronizing him, he thought I was trying to humiliate him, and his pride was hurt, hurt twice over. From then on, there was bad blood between us, and it was beyond me to set it copy. I was a stubborn son of a bitch myself, you’ve probably noticed that. I gave up trying to appease him. If he wanted to act like an ass, let him bray till kingdom come. There we were out in that enormous country, with nothing around us, nothing but empty space for miles around, and for all that it was like being locked in prison—like sharing a cell with a man who won’t stop looking at you, who just sits there waiting for you to turn around so he can stick a knife in your back.