Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Will’m,” he said, cutting dough for croissants. “Where exactly were you born? I mean, if you don’t mind.”

“All that’s public knowledge!” he snapped, mopping with new resolve. “If it must be said again, I came into this world in Elm House, Walthamstow — dead on Clay Street.”

“But when?”

“That, man, is also for the record: March of ’thirty-four.”

“ Nineteen thirty-four …” said the baker, the slight emphasis giving him away.

Will’m stopped his chores and horse-laughed. Gilles was actually relieved — mindful of his wife’s admonition, for a split second he’d seen himself tossed to the floor and gutted.

“If that is the case, then something’s very wrong indeed!”

“So it’s eighteen thirty-four then—”

“Man, are you daft? Of course eighteen. We’re not in Utopia yet, are we?”

“Most certainly not! But well — could you — can you tell me about it? Some thing — say, about where you were raised?”

“Epping Forest, man! That’s where we moved, when I was six. That’s what’s most vivid. A mystical place: boon and balm to a child. Lived at Woodford Hall. Now, that was fifty acres and six hundred pounds to let, six hundred the year. For the rest of my life I never paid more, not even at Kelmscott. So you can see how lavish it was. Father’d made his fortune in copper, so we were set.” His eyes crinkled and gleamed. “Had my own coat of armor as a boy. A smithy did it up, all to my design — well, perhaps I ‘borrowed’ one or two touches from a Negrolian ‘bat-wing’ burgonet — quite the swashbuckler I was! We (all the garrulous Waverly boys) lived and breathed Walter Scott. Rode ponies past blue plums and pollarded hornbeams to watch low-slung craft loiter on the glassy river: then on to Shooter’s Hill and the wide green sea of marshland at Essex.”

Maybe , thought Gilles, Will’m had been a professor, a professor at Oxford who was visiting the States (one somewhat eccentric to begin with), whose mad cow virus kicked in halfway through term at Claremont or USC, the insidious Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy herding him to skid row and such . Maybe if he got to the bottom of it, Gilles could help.

“But how , Will’m — how did you get here ?”

“Do you mean the Abbey?”

“Well … yes! If that’s where we are now.”

“Then if you don’t know—!” He began to laugh.

The baker, yet again mindful of his wife and seeing himself pummeled and bleeding as the morning’s first cheerful customers arrived, thought well enough of today’s session being done. So they worked in relative silence, with Topsy back to his mopping, on occasion muttering epithets toward “those bilious Frankish people,” until the store opened and the lapsed don discharged.

Watching him leave, Gilles Mott ruminated awhile on Paris and that long-lost fiancée; someday if possible he would make amends. Until then, he felt like one of those characters he read about in the paper, who, ensconced in happy second lives, await authorities to enter the workplace and handcuff them so they may at long last answer charges from another time.

There was too much to do. There were designs for textiles that crowded his head like vernal snowflakes; the medieval cathedrals — and St. Mark’s, in Venice — that needed to be cataloged by his Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings; a mental inventory of stained glass and tile, wood furnishings and tableware; correspondence to be kept up, with Ruskin and Rossetti and Georgiana Burne-Jones; fresh lectures on socialism and the decorative arts; and the charting of his daughter’s seizures and wife Jane’s infidelities. Most important, he must continue his life’s work, a book written in his own fine hand, a book called News from Nowhere . He kept it in a downtown locker and went there to work on it three times a week. And so it began

This is the picture of the old house by the Thames to which the people of this story went. Hereafter follows the book itself which is called News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest & is written by William Morris.

For that is who he thought he was: William Morris, robust, protean, Promethean William Morris, the Victorian genius of design.

While it has become simple for laymen to know a ruined mind when they see one — any worthwhile psychotic hears voices through teeth or television — the gods of madness are surely in the far-fetched details that often astonish with the fabulous, unexpected poignancy of cracked new worlds revealed. Those unhinged men and women, having left the ocean of our experience, now reside in stagnant pools and brackish backwaters, encamped by polluted river or stream from which there is no return. Before his descent (until we know his Christian name, we will oscillate between Topsy and Will’m), a friend at his workplace found him acting strange. When told as much, Will’m recounted a dream he’d had that affected him in a most peculiar way. A group of ghouls, he said, asked if he would please to consider the newly formed position of Chairman of the Disembodied. The co-worker laughed uncomfortably, before asking how he replied. “I told them yes,” said Will’m. But his addendum is what set the listener’s teeth on edge: “Because I knew I would soon have time on my hands.”

Now he did have time — Time, like a blue-indigo stain on arms and hands, on beard and triple-E feet: time to rove and decorate cardboard Manor, time to send dispatches of news from nowhere on the onionskin paper of a hand-stitched cloth-bound book, time to dream (as William Morris had a greater century ago) of Iceland and its heroic sagas, time to worry over daughter and wife — time to appropriate a “troublous” life of startling historical richness.

When Topsy got to the 7th Street Viaduct, there was nothing left — the Cadillac had been razed — and Half Dead and Fitz, his one-legged keeper, whose very skin matched his faded seersucker suit and who wore the aspect of an accountant-turned-assassin, stood skittish sentinel. If street rumor had it that George Fitzsimmons was a legendary Department of Children and Family Services caseworker turned out by crack cocaine (rendering him a rather too baroque cautionary tale) — if such talk remained unsubstantiated, then scabby sores from relentless scratchings and general dermatological reconnaissance could be confirmed as easily as the absence of his left limb. The owner of Half Dead, though not quite half, was definitively not quite whole, thanks to diabetes and the great white hacks of County General. One of the mission wags had bestowed on the man and his dog a sobriquet: Half ’n’ Half.

“I’m telling you, Will’m, the Department had one very large, ugly hard-on for your personal effects! I told ’em: Hey! Fold the man’s Cadillac down and he’ll be by to pick it up . This is the man’s home. Would not do it. Proud little shits took every thing away. ’Most killed Half Dead while they were at it.”

The deformed pit bull chased a rat. He limped from broken bones never properly healed and his coat oozed, in spite of Fitz’s unfailing application of vitamin E and antibiotic creams that an outreach worker had wheedled from a sympathetic veterinarian. In glory days, the hapless animal was the warm-up act in South Central dogfights — featured warriors chewed on him in prelims to get their blood up. Fitz had liberated the beast from the pound; the neighborhood handle, with variations, stuck.

“C’mawn, Baby Half,” he chastised. “Don’t you play with them dirty old things.”