Lynne Tillman - American Genius - A Comedy

Perfectly still, not shuffling and shifting, we're waiting for the end or hanging on to dear life, expecting to hear another outburst about what the dead have in store for us.

The Count drops to his seat, breathless, as if he had been running, and his head also drops, like Contesa's, and rests on the table, where soon he falls asleep or slides into elsewhere. I'm witness and participant, spilling from one to the other, I can't tell inside from outside, I mean, I can't control my utterances or guide my thoughts.

— Helen, Helen. Listen to me, you're safe here.

It's the Magician's mellow voice.

— No, I'm not.

— Helen, it's your turn.

— No, it's not. It's…

I point to our Felice and our Kafka, but they are fast asleep or dead to the practical world.

— This is not what I believe at all. What's happening is unacceptable to me.

— Be yourself, the Magician says. Use your intuition.

— I hate that stuff. I think I'm dead.

— Maybe you are.

— That's all right then.

— Stop fighting.

I'm always fighting, I shake myself, I may not be dead, but I don't want to withdraw from this ghost theater in which I'm a spectacle to myself and where I must shuck off disbelief to reap any benefit, though benefit is unlikely. I will disbelief, and this is when the events occur for which I was definitely present and also not. I let my body slacken, knowing my father preferred me to sit up straight, while mentally urging him near me and invoking his spirit, thinking my posture shouldn't matter anymore to him.

— I want to… I'd like my father to talk to me. And my dead friends, I really want to hear their voices again.

I announce this abruptly.

— But I know it can't happen.

I need to concentrate on one dead person, my father, instead other faces crystallize with wispy features and deathly poor complexions, they zoom in and out, stagger by, now my dead friends' faces, their deaths cavorting in a murderers' row, where arbitrary mortality judges and sickens me. I open my eyes and with horror notice the other sitters' critical expressions, so I might be on a jury, I'm litigious, American, I like to watch vicious trials, I'm probably a judge. My breathing quickens, then slows, quickens, then regulates itself, so I forget it, but my sweater scratches me like crazy, I could suffocate inside my skin, I need air, melancholiacs are helped by a change in air. I command myself to smash the decayed faces thrust in front of mine.

— Dad, visit me, come on, it's my wish, tell me about being dead. Come close, I will it. I can't do this. Dad, visit me, stand beside me. I can't… this is stupid.

Green, moldy bodies in morgues, inflamed, bloated, white faces, mutilated corpses, half-blown-away bodies, maggot-ridden, in blue uniform, Gettysburg, lynched black bodies hanging from a despicable tree. Terrible death, I fear you, I have to get out of here, it's sane fear, I answer it, I'm a coward, I should stay, I want to hear them again. My head splits in two.

Did I speak this aloud or is it internal?

I don't think I'm talking in my darkness. I can't halt these alien sensations. I place my hands over my eyes and press hard, scrunching my eyes closed again, so that their veins radiate bloody patterns, garishly colored shapes, pale ashes, the papers I burned this afternoon maybe, everything recognizable is ablaze, like my family's Eames chairs. I can't hold onto an image, so I tell myself, in a stately manner, Mark this now, fire burns complacent things, and in a flash it occurs to me why I take things apart, and I want to remember the reason but can't. Another gust of arctic air makes me shiver, there's nothing to think about, I open my eyes, it's all gone, I shut them again.

I hear my name, "Helen, Helen," so I turn toward the Magician, who stares at me and directs me, "Follow my hands," which I do, I can see his hands waving in front of his face, but suddenly his head belongs to my friend who disappeared. I can hardly breathe. Then the Magician's head enlarges, his eyes expand, enormous like universes, much larger than my mad cat's just before he gouged my left calf, and I follow his agile hands, how they weave in the air, like weavers' hands at looms, my head drops onto my chest and rolls around, or from side to side, oddly enough I recall this because while my head feels detached and airy, I'm still holding on, so a question about consciousness wings by, about how markedly it can differ from self-consciousness, when it emerges from a consciousness aligned to a self, then questions disappear. I'm not con cerned about fainting, I worry I'm dying, even if my skin still itches, my arms, chest, legs, and maybe my dead friends or their ghosts leave messages on my back.

Against my will-I have no will-while the Magician mumbles something, my skull empties, and the inside of my head becomes dense. I enter a deeper trance, or I might still be in a hypnogogic state, but I do believe the Magician may have hypnotized or entranced me, because from now on what I am certain of is negligible, what I remember is beyond description in ordinary terms.

I'm near the ocean, because I hear waves, I ask someone, my father, or my friend taken by AIDS, the question I'd asked my mother as a child: Is life worth it, even though you die? She said then, Yes, because you have happiness when you're alive, you have a lot of good times before you die. I didn't accept what she said then. I don't get an answer now. I breathe in the green ocean, fall headlong into a whitecapped wave, let it consume me, I'd been hungry for its endlessness, the hot sand, the summer wind's raw perfume, the innocent exhaustion after swimming. I take off my itchy sweater and walk unsteadily toward the windows, calling desperately for a birdman, and then Moira, who is apparently clearheaded, throws my sweater over my head, puts my arms through the sleeves, and leads me back to my chair. Moira whispers in my ear, "Did you know my name `Moira' means destiny?"

Hearing the word from her mouth shocks me, and I jump back, exclaiming, "No, I had no idea, I didn't know." Moira's face transforms, it contorts grievously, and, if that is destiny, it's an ogre, so I slap her. I suppose I never really liked Moira, though her oddness and inquisitiveness attracted me from the first. Moira smiles and transforms into my young wild cat, but I'm in a chair, looking down on myself from above, an outof-body experience, and in it I feel estranged from the world, but long for it, wanting to return and to live forever. In scarlet ink, fluttering on my eyelids, "Live the life you have imagined," but soon I perceive the closeness of the ogre, destiny, snarling like my mad, dead cat, but destiny can't be put to sleep, the way he was, it doesn't go away, and, worse, death wouldn't. Death stops everything. It's unfair, but not unjust, since everyone suffers its democratic tyranny. Things flow along, whole and disintegrated, I have at least two minds, so I exhort one, maybe aloud, "Don't stop, don't stop. I wish… I wish…"

Then my father appeared, I think he did and I also think he didn't, and my best friend killed in a car crash showed up, with her young, toothy grin, "You haven't changed," I exclaimed, and there my brother stood, dead the way I thought. "Everyone wishes to speak to the dead." I heard that again. My father wore his dark brown trunks, I saw him swimming behind the breakers, far from shore, swimming farther and farther away, until he disappeared.

The Count produced fearsome yowls, I reclaimed my body and wondered if he were possessed by the devil, but didn't accept that could make sense. The Count enunciated disconnected words and phrases" tiny second hand, poison ivy, Descartes, lacquer and jade, the antichrist"-with many long pauses, as if completing his sentences in an interior monologue. I waited for more revelation, but if it came, I missed it. The Magician hushed him and snapped his fingers, and the Count's seizure, if it was, halted miraculously, and then the Magician sang or chanted, I don't remember the lyrics, though I usually have extremely good recall of conversations and dialogue, but none of his words stayed with me. Yet with them, we woke up from our sleep or trances, conscious of leaving one peculiar world for another. And so, the sitting reached its end, the way everything does, and, slowly, one after another in an orderly single file, we walked from the Rotunda Room, all but the Count, who, after his outburst or seizure, vanished. No one said a word. It was a few minutes past 1 a.m., so only an hour had passed, but it seemed, as they say, an eternity.