Lynne Tillman - American Genius - A Comedy

A defiant quiet surrounds us, it or solitude penetrates me severely. I don't know where to set Contesa's admissions and entreaties, since I heard what I should never have heard and can't accept, I did hear her, and, for this reason alone, I should run away. But I don't, I can't, my legs are leaden, my head and skin throb, and I'm stunned and humbled by seeing and hearing what I don't believe.

The Magician waves his hands in the air, directs his gaze at the table with an aspect both friendly and stern, but he makes me nervous and tired. I close my eyes, I open my eyes, Contesa's eyes are closed, she doesn't stir, I close my eyes. The unique quiet mutes my incredulity, its constant eeriness has substance. The roof becomes alive, a giant animal, my chair arouses me, the round walnut table creaks with suspense, the brash wind hurls itself against the antique windows. The room is agitated by the racket and rustling, by hawks nesting on the roof, where Birdman must have crawled to rescue a wounded tree sparrow, where nocturnal cats chase each other.

The Magician performs another ceremonial incantation and requests us once more to unburden ourselves.

— Speak as you wish, freely, at will. If the spirits want to, they will show up. You will feel their presence. Stay as still as you can and absorb the darkness. Open yourselves and unburden your heart.

I cringe and feel glad, too. I see something like a cloud or smoke issue from his mouth.

The Turkish poet chants drowsily in Turkish, his sounds pleasing and harmonious, until he switches to a halting English, and, with his head wrapped in his hands and his eyes shut, makes a confession: "I want to be in serenity, because once a long time ago, I did very wrong thing to a friend. Now that friend he is dead, and I would give him my true feeling, if he would come now to me. I am sorry, more sorry each day I live. I can say this. I admit. When I look to the sky, I am seeing your face. I tell you this, I took your friend for me, your final lover, with lust, I did sex, and I told him what I knew bad about you, and it was not true. He came to me, we lay, but you never knew it. I am in shame. If you come to me, I plead your forgiveness. I want to speak to you."

He yawns, and his face relaxes.

My brain-damaged mother often talks in her sleep to her dead husband in complete sentences, holding a conversation in which she asks him questions and responds to answers that only she hears, while her voice remains steady and low, and, though unsated, fatigued in sleepless sleep, she awaits answers that may imperil her contentment.

The Turkish poet drops his head, like a supplicant or penitent, and there's muttering in the tremulous semi-dark. "But even so," he protests, in a low, guttural monotone, "I can believe truly for more sex in everything." With his head down, he slaps the table. "More sex in everything" raised, apparently, for my benefit, since he's inexplicably insisted on this point to me before, but not in such a strange context. The young married man's voice comes in a cry from across the room, he must be far from me or the table: "You're all crazy, this is nuts, but Arthur's right, I'm here, and I'm sitting in this crazy room with you. But so's the devil, he's in this room, you know, he must be. He's in me, I'm evil, and that's my perverted wisdom." I hear a bizarre, intermittent cackling and chortling from him, but others say he ranted about ravishing infidelities and an insatiable hunger for stray women, even on his marriage day, when he had sex with his best man's girlfriend behind a boathouse. Two years later, his best man died in a boating accident, in a motorboat stored in the adulterous boathouse, and it is to him he addresses himself, begging him to return so he can ask forgiveness. Between the scratchy noises or static, I believe I hear him calling a name over and over, until the young married man sobs, I hear him, I do, I know it's not me. Contesa and Moira awaken or sleepwalk over to him, to wherever he's gone, to comfort him.

— The devil's here? Come on.

That's Spike.

— No one said this would be easy, a voice says.

That's Henry, I'm pretty sure.

— That's right.

Arthur is agreeing with him.

I press my eyes closed more tightly and assure myself it's not bizarre, just uncanny, when raging fires and words written in scarlet ink cross my eyes, the Reverend Samuel Willard's account of Elizabeth Knapp, a Salem girl possessed by the devil: The devil has oftentimes appeared to her, presenting the treaty of a covenant, that he urged upon her constant temptations to murder her parents, her neighbors, our children, especially the youngest, tempting her to throw it in the fire.

I night have recited this to everyone, I'm not sure if I'm speaking or when I'm speaking what I'm saying. In my head, I'm awake, aware of everything, the way I am when I'm breathing nitrous oxide, inhaling its sweet sickness, on the chair of my earnest periodontist, who keeps the radio tuned to public stations, whose programs become confused with my thoughts, so I may be speaking aloud to the host and his guests, but then I don't care, because waves of pleasure slap inside my body, during which my periodontist often asks me to open my mouth wider, but I believe my mouth is open wide.

— My skin is so dry, you can write on it. I need to shed it.

— Like a snake.

That's Spike speaking, after me. Maybe I told her human beings shed their skin completely every twenty-eight days. No one Spike loves is dead, and she doesn't know what she's doing here, except hanging out, so she proposes in a singsong voice to implore Einstein to return, which strikes her, a young mathematician, as ridiculously comic and tragic, so she can barely sit still, jumps away from the table, and races out of the room through the wooden, double doors, only to return, because she doesn't know where she is otherwise or what to do, and she may anyway be asleep. I don't know how much time has passed, when the Count rouses himself. I'm sure my eyes are open, I see him as plain as day tuck his Breguet into his coat pocket, satisfied it won't be pickpocketed again, then watch him as he gathers himself together to address the Magician, Contesa, or his lost wife, sometime before I rouse myself and say whatever they tell me I did, about which I have intermittent and vague recollections. The Magician hasn't talked yet with his mother, though she's the dead person he wanted to contact, the motive for the seance-which is no longer a seance to me; I don't know what it is, except an extension of so-called reality into so-called hyperreality or unreality, though in my head nothing is unreal, I don't know what unreal is. Dizzily, I try to catch hold of it, it slides away, splitting into pieces.

The Count murmurs and rises, even more angular than I recall, in shadow he's a portrait by El Greco, and he flings and jiggles his arms, maybe pushing off something, a spirit, but that's unlikely, since it wouldn't have mass. The Count's voice sounds dreamy, even though he appears to be lecturing someone, partly because he's standing at attention as if behind a lectern, but his eyes are shut and there are many pauses between his words: My rare horological artifacts. French and English, I bow to their artistry. Serviceable clocks, to be blunt, ugh, grandfathers, grandmothers, wall units. Comme it faut. American Blind Watch, yes, ingenious. Big numbers for the vision impaired. Ingenious.

He swings his arms again and yawns.

— Let me say this about the devil: He exists. Made his acquaintance, many years ago in the South. My family, in my town. I ran as far as I could. RUN. I told you to run. You. Not to leave me. Run from me, and now you're. A barn door face. You said it. I don't know where. No answer is an answer… My darling, when I leave this world and join you, to be with you again, wherever you are, would you… Oh, please, let me leave this necropolis.