Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“But this isn't the eighteenth century any more. A guy with a lot of power and money will just get richer and more powerful at the expense of the people. What I mean to say is that allowing one person to pursue their own definition of happiness will often prevent several others from their own pursuits. And this isn't fair. It isn't just.”

“To think how we've regressed,” he winces. “To think that speaking of liberty promotes the agendas of men who would rape their own mothers for a dollar. Yes, of course they want the freedom to exploit. They want to see every social program gutted, privatized, and left to whither and die. They want to see every roadblock set up to make sure we don't return to the days when a man had no choice but to work for subsistence wages removed. These men befoul the name of liberty in their quest for power and wealth. No, I do not speak of them. I speak of men for whom liberty is infinitely more important than the free market. What seems so odd to me, however, is that the people who trust humanity the least tend to resent regulations the most. Why? If the government steals from you, it's called corruption. If a businessman steals from you, it's called profit. I want more regulations to protect my liberty from corporations, which, contrary to what the Supreme Court may say, are not people.”

“Okay.”

“I apologize for that little rant, my boy,” he laughs. “I asked a simple question and gave you an irrelevant answer.” He sips his coffee. “Let's go back, shall we. Why did you decide to look for my son as opposed to, say, the Holy Grail?”

“There are a number of reasons,” as I look to him. “For one, I thought it'd be a good opportunity—”

“Opportunity!” He smiles. “Thought it may not be my place to play the part of the pedant, I do believe it important to impart this one bit of information to you. Do you know the etymology of the word 'opportunity'?” I shake my head. “It comes from the word opportunus . It means, quite simply, the best way to reach port. Think about that.”

This continues for quite some time. He provides odd pieces of wisdom for which I am less grateful than I appear (which is certainly reminiscent of the night Tomas and I spent with Patrick). He also reproaches me for behaving my age. Repeatedly. I am understandably afraid to seriously argue with him. He is Coprolalia's father after all.

It's something of a disappointment that Isaac was never one for photography. The most recent picture he has of his son was taken four years before the accident, on his thirtieth birthday. It does not take him long to find it.

Mordecai does not look the way I had imagined him — his short, brown hair has a reddish tint to it; his face is somewhat long and thin, lacking in any discernible feature except for the absence of defined cheekbones or a beard or anything that could be called distinctive. His ears are not as big as others have let on, but they do protrude from his head a good deal. His skin tone is a pale, Slavic white. On his body, I can say little — he has hidden himself within that sweatshirt that others have mentioned. As I assumed, he appeared to be about my height.

I can't define the man I had thought him to be. Perhaps I had never taken the time to define him physically, so none of this really changes anything. I guess I thought he was going to radiate something — charisma, afflatus, rebellion. And yet there is nothing alluring about him, nothing that invites suspicions or entertains a mystery. He was just some dude. For all I know, I rode the train with him the day before he died.

Mr. Adelstein provided a lot of biographical information, though most of it was either obvious or not particularly relevant to…well, anything. Mordecai never went to college; he read a great deal; he lived at home until he was twenty-three. After living with Willis Faxo in the City, he moved to Greenpoint. He lived there until sometime in the late-nineties, but Mr. Adelstein cannot remember an exact year. The dowager who rented the place to him either died or decided to move to Florida. He then moved to Morningside Heights for a few years, where he roomed with his cousin, Shayna, who was then enrolled at Columbia. In the spring of 2003, he moved into a studio apartment not too far away from where Vinati currently lives. He remained there until the end of his life.

Mr. Adelstein was ambivalent about this area, especially when Mordecai was new to it. When Mordecai had his nose broken by a gang of muggers, his father was less than hesitant to applaud his intuition. The incident occurred in 2005, on Vinati's corner. It involved a brick.

I can imagine Mordecai growing up in this house. I can see Mr. and Mrs. Adelstein bringing home the new baby from the hospital, being welcomed with balloons and adoring relatives ready to peer past the blue blanket to see the wingless putti with his eyes barely open. They clamor for a glimpse, speak, like Mr. Adelstein, in that stereotypically Brooklyn Jewish accent, and argue about the food, or perhaps just food in general (“You think they have the best babka in the city?” “I know a great butcher who used to run place in the Village; best pastrami you ever had” “Bad kugel? Such a thing is an impossibility”). I can see him in the crib, the young mother fawning over the potential of her first child. I can see him at three running from the kitchen into the living room and jumping on the couch, perhaps on one of the beds upstairs. I can see him in the years leading up to puberty, studying the Torah with his father and preparing for his bar mitzvah at the desk by the record player. I can see him at the age of fourteen, watching the television in the den, which is adjacent to the parlor in which I find myself. I can see him as this man's son, and I can begin to understand just who he was.

But it's not really him, is it? It's me. I see myself doing all of these things, and I imagine myself doing these things. I am both performer and audience, protagonist and spectator. And yet it's all false; because I can't be him any more than I can be Chuang Tzu, let alone the butterfly he once dreamed himself being. To be him, to be anyone else, would mean to not be myself; even if I knew all of Tzu's experiences, even if I knew what he knew about himself and the butterfly he believed himself to be, I would still be the one experiencing the dream, thereby making it profoundly different. I would have to sacrifice myself to truly understand someone else. And, even if this were possible, how could I be said to be the one experiencing the life of anyone but myself? I have ceased to exist; therefore, I have ceased to have experiences.

And then it occurs to me: The Bay Ridge Collection was not meant to be seen as a collection of his work. His goal was to attract people, to awaken them so that they would scrutinize the writings on the walls, to see that they were a part of a community. And he did this simply by drawing attention to what was already there. So it wasn't an end; it was a means to a larger end that had nothing to do with himself, let alone fame or notoriety.

“You appear to have stumbled upon some revelation, my boy,” Mr. Adelstein says after what I realize is a long period of introspection on my part. “What have you realized?”

“I finally get it.”

“Get what?”

“That the content of his work is completely irrelevant. It's the context. It's all context. That's what Faxo meant.”

He nods slowly. “You must explain yourself better than that.”

“I can't. It's just that I realize that he said all he needed to say. He could have said it with a single stroke of the pen. The exegeses, the papers by Winchester, the theses by grad students: they're superfluous.”

“You sound like a man I once knew.”