I DON’T UNDERSTAND much of what I see and less of what I feel.
On the day that I died
…everything stopped except you: you kept running, running farther and farther away from everything. From me. I was lying there watching you run. And then I was watching myself, and the idiot with the bike. He was crying. He could not believe what he had done, of course. No one could.
I watched you wither and shrink into yourself. You were not even going to cry for me. The bike idiot was crying for himself and the consequences he had just unleashed upon himself and his family.
I was dead, on the ground, and you were suddenly abstract. You were running.
I was lost. You were gone and I could not believe it. I watched you. And now you are in my head? Am I losing my mind?
They will tell you that you are crazy. They will say that it is guilt. They will not know. They cannot know.
And just like that, on that day that he died in the park, sprawled prone and limp near a bicycle’s bent frame, Doug Templeton suddenly ballooned into an ineluctable and inextricable facet of Harley’s life.
There is great freedom within. I can summon words and feelings, confronting one with the other, demanding and receiving a response. The world outside and how anyone ever lived in it were inconsequential now, a chessboard with checkers on it. And chess pieces in the field, reenacting, performing. Now opposite color bishops contested, dancing and shifting on their feet. They can stand close, the breath of each warm on the other’s cheek, chin. But no closer – slide away, across the board, the other follows. Sidle up near; but she is on light, you are on dark.
It’s a dilemma.
Harley rubbed his forehead with thumb and forefinger. Night had fallen long ago and most of the unsettling ambient sounds had dwindled by four in the morning, and yet, in their paucity and in isolation, the breaking edge of every noise clattered more intrusively, reached in from beyond the window, partially ajar.
A l’espagnolette, it was called, when one casement window is held in place by a pompously ornate knob on the other, allowing cool air and sundry noises to flow into a room. Paris at this hour should be silent, punctuated only by anomalies.
Doug had been with Harley every day since That Day, since he died in that Illinois park so many, many years ago. At first, Harley had been nervously afraid. He wondered if something were wrong with him. Doug spoke with him all the time, whenever his eyes would close, whenever his attention would wander, whenever the sound of people speaking around him began to slip in and out of focus – there was Doug, resolving in the unfocused middle distance, re-centering the composition of the scene around him.
Until Harley dissolved too. Until it was only Addi talking to Doug. Doug to Addi.
Sometimes it was a dialogue, but more often Doug would only play with the images deposited in Harley’s mind over the course of a day, or minute. A conversation. A palimpsest of a vintage advertising poster for Dubonnet peering out from behind a yellow sale announcement from Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville. Le BHV. As opposed to BHL – Bernard Henri Levi, the 1968 disestablishmentarian philosopher, the public intellectual. Or PPDA: Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. Why does everyone like acronyms? Harley hated acronyms.
H.H.A.
By virtue of his new metamorphosis, Doug now knew everything about Harley Edison. Nothing could ever be obscured from him, no awkward or unbecoming or uncomfortable thought could be censored away. Doug Templeton received it all as waiting canvas and displayed it mercilessly back, until turning away was no longer an option.
Doug did not name her, but there was one person on Harley’s mind now, and Harley struggled to rewrite scenes that he knew were coming, as if his life were a scripted drama, cobbled together by a roomful of disgraced and disgruntled soap opera copywriters. The dripping melodrama, the disregard for verisimilitude, and it would all happen to Harley in time.
Your opposite bishops are ice skaters. They move gracefully around each other, dramatically dancing, ever drawing near, never touching. None of the movement, the beautiful, precise, and meticulous movement, could mean a damn thing. And the queen, laughing, has not revealed her face.
What is this? Who’s the queen?
You want me to tell, don’t you? I would love to. But you know it all already. You are in here with me. You are not looking to the place where the beaming lighthouse of truth is pointing. The game was set up so many years ago. What will you do, Addi, with the white bishop when you finally box her in? Does she covet a crown? Will you give it to her? Chess players deployed on a checkerboard.
Chess and checkers are played on the same board.
Are they now? Interesting. Tell me this Addi: when you are singing in the woods, is it allowed? When you are singing in church is it permitted? Do you sing the same way? If your rook were standing unprotected, you could be jumped. The rules spring from the board, Addi. Never mind who is queen. She could be Everyone and Anyone could be She. And then again, if you blink and squint, maybe the board is really a chessboard after all. Maybe it is not up to the players to say which is which. The board rules meaning and has its rules.
Harley laid back on the bed, an arm over his forehead, eyes closed beneath. Doug was riding a wave now. He could sense the power of the rising water below, surging and pushing through the surface in majestic rolling waves. He allowed the images to wash over him, the undertow pulled him into sleep.
His shuttering eyes saw the window knob, painted over in its chipping white sheath, the sculpted surface showing a garish pattern beneath whose detail has been submersed in successive layers of enamel. Paris herself is garish like that: unremembered nostalgia cringing and clinging to places and objects, allowing Parisians to elevate themselves in undeserving entitlement.
The way they speak to each other, the faint implications of haughty disdain that inhabit each remark and passing glance. Some feel its imposture. Some live within its sanctimonious confines, setting rules of taste and savoir vivre that only resonate within their small echo chamber. It is easy to be caught up in the elaborate displays of long dead mannerisms. Bow slightly when you shake hands. Use the fish knife to position the fish on the back of the fish fork and then to deliver it delicately to the mouth. Pretend it is only adequate if you love it. Better still: contrive to hate it and disparage it.
The spiral carries you downward to the point where you no longer know what is permissible and what will cause you to be ostracized and ridiculed mercilessly by waiters on the Place des Vosges.
The Treaty of Westphalia entered his dream again – the same Ter Borch inspired still life of crowding statesmen swearing to the peace around an illogically small table. Were they in Osnabrück or Münster? The 109 figures seem to converge slowly on the treaty table, physically altering its shape, adopting as they all were the new and frightening paradigm in a world without a Holy Roman.
In a world of their own crafting. In a world without God.
In his dream, Harley stood in the back, wearing red. His feet rose by an unseen force below, sending him leaning forward and over the proceedings. When he would shout and protest, he had no voice. Each time he awoke, the paradigm had changed forever. Besser ein Ei im Frieden als ein Ochs im Kriege. Free eggs, warrior oxen.
Pushing himself off the mattress, Harley open his eyes. The skies over Paris were still somber, but it was the season. Paris weeps in the dark in autumn. The images from his dream, by now unwelcomely familiar to him, began to dissipate slowly, releasing Harley. Doug kept the pieces for himself.
It’s an irony, don’t you think, that I withhold the meaning of this dream from you. Because if I know it then you know it too. And I do know it, but you run from it while protesting that you want to know. It is overly tangled and archly abstruse: all the more so since it is all a show. With only Harley in the audience. Only one person clapping half-heartedly as the curtain calls begin. A Holy Roman Enigma, an unpeaceful peace. And again and again.
Are you scrambling eggs? Scramble some eggs.
The back and forth between the voice of Doug and every other thought was not as insistent as it might at first appear. Harley scrambled three eggs, discarding one of the egg whites and adding butter near the end. Comfort breakfast.
Coffee and a cigarette. His only one of the day, he thought. From now on. The time seemed stuck at 5:22 am. Not night and not day. Clearly, Harley’s night had slipped away, but he pushed back at the approach of day. A moment of reflection, to extend into the next several hours. Days, if possible.
*
Now all the pieces are arrayed and aligned. I am who am your imagination and your friend and your imaginary friend see it all – not as your conscious not subconscious but as a separate entity who is you and the same as you. Yet you are blind to some things that I can see. That is selectivity.
I choose.
Harley took out his notebook. He began to sketch out the nights images and the ideas that continued to seethe within him. Often this was the only way of freeing himself of the voice, the demon voice that Doug Templeton had become. There was no evil intent – of course. But Harley was never alone except when he could write. It was remorseless torture, adorned as a priceless gift.
The human brain operates, he mused, as a dialogue. That when you are not speaking to another person, you may be speaking to yourself – aloud and thereby positing yourself as your own interlocutor, or silently. When your dialogue is silent, beyond the constraints of sense and logic, the stranglehold of grammatical language and words, random thoughts and broken ideas churn as one admixture, allowing you the chance, occasionally, to pull a single idea from the chyme and save it for further use.
You are not aware of the process; it is autonomous. Yet Harley remains acutely aware this during this unconscious act, during other people may rest. Within him the words, the pith of what had been his friend Doug Templeton, are constantly active.
And I with you, my lethargic friend. Do you not think I could be resting, peacefully? Do you not think I wonder at how I arrived here in your hippocampus? Mixing memory with desire?
And he wrote:
He faced complexity on every side. His work, only just begun, required his presence of mind and spirit as well as body. His mind, however, was beset with the untempered despondency brought by Tess and her refusal to come to Paris.
“He himself wrestled with asking her to come and, after deciding to do so, could only assume that she would have said yes. He did not imagine any other response. But she said she would not come.”
More work needs doing here. She refused in the phone call. The call that she had made, not him. He needs to press the argument – and she will relent, he feels sure of it. But then,
“Does this relieve him of his burden and quandary about bringing her into this new world, this reality without ‘them’ as part of it? By convincing her to come top Paris, he is forcing a new throw off the dice. Paris without her past. Paris without his. Without the shadow of Dalisay or the callous senior partner. Already he could not remember the name, but she could. Certainly. Can this be a better future? Could they then – ”
An unfamiliar aposiopesis. Because he did not know. He could not complete the sentence. Doug marshalled the words, but they would not coalesce. The rain had begun to fall, rhythmically syncopated, splashing against the window still ajar. The grey rain of a Paris morning infused with Archie Shepp and Dollar Brand’s mournful saxophone sorrowings. Neither jazzman had been to Paris, but they knew. Fortunato.
“Could they then start something that had never begun? Over these past months, she behaved to the world as though she were promised only to him, that they were one. She wanted everyone to see them as an exemplary couple. To her it was a matter of supreme indifference how she actually felt about him. Action is what counts. Acts are what matters.
“But he knew there should be more. He wanted more.”
Harley felt a sigh shudder throughout his body.
This is the real story. These words have life and will rise to meet the others. Here is where Harley Edison takes a firmer grasp on his own destiny. Not leaving it in anyone’s injudicious and capricious hands. Not again. It is a moment in which you, Harley, might actually come into your own. You do not want to call her. You do not want to argue a point that you will certainly win. You are alone, you feel lonely, of course you do. That road leads to bars and nightclubs and other imaginative Paris nightlife, not calling in the one from whom you need this time apart.
In his mind, Doug formed an argument which was, of course, his own. He would not have been so cruelly self-absorbed in it though. A further rusty nail remained, bent and ugly and in need of hammering. Doug knew and saw it too; because he had to. He dared not even spin the words around it, so much he feared their power: Harley did not want her to come, he needed whatever this “more” was. He needed solitude and space. But even more insidiously, he could not lose this argument. He would not let it stand.
Oh god…
She had to come, he rationalized. An end to this discussion could not end in her abrupt “no.” No was not an argument or a reason. No needed more meat around it to be acceptable. Harley decided that he would write her an impassioned email. The email itself would not convince her to come, he would have to call. But she would relent. He could see it clearly.
Tess’s coming to Paris would establish who they were to each other. Tess would have to face the trauma and the demons she left here so long ago. That alone would be worth her coming over.
And thus would the decision that brings Tess back to Paris, to the city where she does not want to be, to the man that she may possibly not love, be born of Harley’s overwhelmingly stupid spite. Cry havoc and let slip the wombats of humiliation.
