Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

But suddenly, as if to trump my own self-mockery, thermal hurricanes were charging down the gorge, a cold front turning the sky green and the grass blue. The air was filled with the disordered wingbeats and jargon of birds, lightning was held captive in the incandescent cloudbanks, and when it finally struck without a single drop of moisture, small fires broke out in the cornfields, and the currents paled in sulfurous ravines. White legions of thistledown blanketed the flickering thickets, and the woods were garlanded with snowy wool. Flash after flash of lightning ripped from the burst clouds, and the air was sullied by the chemical smell of fading leaves as the solar winds tore about our house.

A large tulip tree was uprooted in the garden, its soil-clotted roots ripping a hole large enough for a swimming pool, its branches parting just in time to fall to either side of a statue without injuring it. Shutters opened, slammed shut then opened again, shattering their hinges. Rooftiles and chimney cornices spun through the air like ducks with their heads shot off. Stripped of their leaves, empty colonnades of poplar bent double. Hedges were flattened, yews exploded. And from his tower suite, Father’s papers fluttered in an endless stream from the open windows, leaves of manuscript littering the grounds like a week-old battlefield of a lost empire.

The last aria had gone sharp and faint at the same time, shuddering bell-notes on our grim scene. Then there was a great beating of wings behind me, and against the gray clouds a flash of white, as dearest Waterlily, a lace-strewn dove in gilded talons, was borne from the cold heights across the lustral waters to the Field of Mars. Her corpse was never found.

The wind and sun went down together. A tongue of flame licked at my hair but did not burn; I was blushing for my sister and myself, Ainoha’s Fire Child. My thoughts were full of singeing old men’s beards and burning babies in their cradles, as I heard for the first time in many years the fly buzzing in the buried doll’s skull, and every image cried out, “Kill!”

I descended into the spinal fluid of Cannonia to cool off. The shore was no longer a resilient couch but a shingle in a chalk-white sea. The remnants of the Mze seemed to be a series of strings, syrupy, glassy, and clear, like something you could cut with scissors.

Half in unhappy love, I leapt into the slack shallows. The exposed reed-beds issued no love song; their chant had been replaced by cicadas. The young virgin’s faces on the stalks of underwater grain now fell flat on the black ooze. I washed my own flushed face as Ainoha once did when she smeared her half-frightened boy with mulberry juice upon his brow and temples, and set prehistoric time to ticking. But I now knew I was well beyond her rule over the limpid, beyond the reproval of her rosy lips. Stripping down, I walked briskly through the Mze to the meadow bank, never once submerged, then back again to the deepest part of the motionless channel, to take the tally of the darkness. The water came up only to my heart. There, beyond my father’s athletic instincts, I could ponder his pre-Christian lesson — that while the father can lighten every care and crisis and shape his fall, the father cannot save his son from fate or bring him back to life. For it is the world itself which has a tragic flaw.

The water boiled around me and the seething Mze went white with the bellies of dead fish. The percipiencies of the river washed my wounded senses; its susurances tempered something sharper than mere manhood. Rising from the sheen of marble with a penumbra of reeds and poplar leaves, beneath a straying moon, I moved naked through the clichés of shadows, returning to my home and a sleep of iron. Above the river, resting in its course, the stars ran backward.

The Astingi believe that the Mze does not disperse when it enters the ocean, but remains a river within a river, fresh, sweet, and ochre. Taking hidden channels through the sea, it emerges as a fountain on Big Turtle Island, in the courtyard of a castle built upon a swamp at Port Chaonia, a mime of Troy, City of the Tired Ones.

And you, Stars! Pray witness Waterman’s return to his remnant element, there to welcome me in yellow depths, and buoyed by my thousand names, proceed downstream toward allies, to resume our life beneath the waves.

There were several years, during the sixties, when the whole country was grinning from ear to ear, that I heard nothing from Iulus, and my letters to him went unanswered. If you could have licked my heart it would have poisoned you. The Company was not amused and threatened more than once to cut off his modest stipend. Even Ed Kirby was distinctly uncool. “He’s having us off again,” he growled. I could have put a tracer on him, but Iulus had his nasty side, and I didn’t see the point in sacrificing any of our polite Notre Dame boys.

In any event, in the early seventies, when it became clear that the country had suffered a kind of stroke, our correspondence resumed sporadically. For a time Iulus had worked as a civil engineer in Arizona, a gymnastics teacher at a girls’ school in the North Carolina mountains, and as a répétiteur with the Pacifica Opera, and while he never responded to any of my queries directly, one could infer from his general observations what he was up to. He apologized, incidentally, for his silence, admitting he had gone a little crazy in the sixties. There had been so many dashing young women, so many wonderful groups to infiltrate—“never have so many had so little to revolt about, but,” he chortled, “the worst dancers in history.” His autoportraits from this period are particularly compelling; though he was embarrassed only to find that even the strongest drugs had no effect upon him whatsoever, “except a slight ringing in the ears,” surprised to find how a fully formed and hardened personality might resist modern chemistry, country music, and sex in public.

And then one fine day, I arrived at work to find the hallway blocked with crates, and on my desk an index of their contents with Company instructions for summary, translation, and vetting. It was the balance of the Semper Vero Archives.

You will appreciate what I discovered that I had to deal with. There were, first of all, several thousand pages of Iulus’s family observations written in dense High Cannonian; “the Professor’s” unpublished, unreadable, endless novellas; and the secret scientific correspondence of “The Academician,” as well as OGPU surveillance records of his activities. Add to this tens of thousands of documents in every European, Slavic, and Turkic language; his mother’s letters and diaries, his father’s Chronik , an elaborate daybook in which his personal reflections were surrounded by daily accounts of Semper Vero, missing only a single day in fifty years; as well as the balance of his Historae Astingae , a subject for which no further sources existed, but everything remained to be said — not to mention more than you could ever want to know about our canine friends throughout world history. And there was more. Each box of papers was topped off with a handwritten precis which attempted to place his annual autobiographies in the context of the other papers. The sonuvabitch had gone literary on me! Still, I was reenergized by Iulus’s calligraphic handwriting and old-fashioned idiom immediately, and set to work with an intensity I had not experienced since the war years, like Petrarch fondling the Homer he could not quite understand. I realized that for good or ill the rest of my life had just been filled up.

In their typically understated and monotonous manner, my colleagues filled me in. It turned out that Iulus had kept a rezident house in Connecticut where there has always been a high incidence of abandoned homes whose attics contain some amateur unpublished work, and while this summer home had provided him with decent enough cover, his notes testified that Connecticut was his least favorite state—“an inbred and dilapidated working class servicing an incurious wealthy, whose sole motive, like the gypsy moth, seems to be to escape any troublesome sensibility. . a political economy canopied with a warren of second-rate boys’ and girls’ schools, giving a delusive caste of renewal to the entire nonentity of a state.”