American Innovations: Stories

DEAN OF THE ARTS

I owe to the convergence of boredom and an atavistic attraction to the color gold the discovery on a near-empty shelf in my childhood home (and in my childhood) of The Collected Correspondence of Manuel Macheko. The only other books in the house offered health or income tax advice. But Macheko wrote to Menachem Begin, explaining that Begin’s last name was confusing; to Barbara Bush, offering a broccoli recipe (with cumin seeds) that might persuade her husband to take “a new view of the humble crucifer”; to hair dye companies, seeking free samples of dyes they might recommend to men. His book had over me the kind of power more often attributed to a Vermeer: a room with a map on the wall, a letter just arrived, a ship on the sea visible through the window, and the window letting in light from a wondrous and unboundable world that would one day make its way to you, surely as the Annunciation. That was the feeling I got anyway. Back then. I didn’t understand the letters as attempts, at least in part, at comedy. A surprising number of the pursued correspondents replied, sometimes tersely, sometimes expansively, and their responses were included in the book, alongside Macheko’s original letters. In fact, the book was dedicated “To those who took the time to respond.” Sometimes Macheko’s sentiments were “appreciated” or “had received due consideration.” But sometimes more. A former Indian prime minister had taken the time to handwrite an extensive note confirming that he did drink his own urine every day as part of his health regimen, which also included celibacy, and celery. Joan Rivers stated that she had not had a face-lift, just two and a half hours of ingenious hair and makeup. Helen Gurley Brown advised Manuel to just ask his girlfriend straight out if she had herpes.

I don’t know how many copies of the self-published book existed, or exist. I believe Macheko distributed them himself. When I got older, I came to think of that book, for reasons I can (sort of) explain, as a cry for help. That said, not long ago I was looking at a handbook of facial expressions designed to teach autistic youth how to read emotion; it consisted of captioned photos of happy faces, of angry faces, of worried faces, etc; I couldn’t really “read” the supposedly easy-for-normal-people-to-“read” faces; I mean, I could, but also I couldn’t; I could tell what emotions I was supposed to see, sure, but to my heart, they all read the same, they all looked like cries for help.

* * *

Despite looking it up repeatedly, I seem never able to recall the name of the preacher of the sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God sermon, and I am similarly chronically unable to recall the real name of the pseudonymous Mr. Macheko. I retain only that he was a Persian — his term — professor living in Norman, Oklahoma (where I lived), and that when I came across his book, he had already been, or shortly thereafter was, fired from his position as a professor under circumstances that were, I was given to understand from my own father, a colleague of his, in some way unjust or superstitious or not unrelated to the author’s having especially dark skin and a warbling accent and a mysterious religion in an almost entirely white — and oddly preppy — department of a university in one of the most politically conservative university towns in the country. I had once heard rumors, similar to those about the high school French teacher, that Macheko attended a weekly cross-dressing night at a bar in Oklahoma City. I think I instinctively understood, of both men, that the rumors were a version of slander that a patina of time and geographical shifting would reveal as a readiness for veneration, or fear, but not truth. But of the firing: presumably, Macheko was also straightforwardly irritating. That can cause anyone problems.

I mention this irritatingness in order to give the benefit of doubt, at least kind of, to the midwesterners I grew up among, who took me — also an odd-looking foreigner — into their homes, and who taught me more about openness and social justice than anyone since, and about whom no one around me these days is, I think, fair. And I presume this — that Macheko was irritating — because his son was one year ahead of me in high school and he played trumpet. He was very, very talkative. He had bad acne, a big nose, glasses, lots of energy, and a cheerfulness whose border none of us had encountered. The social shame heaped unjustly and unsurprisingly on young Macheko for reasons of genetics and origin and whatnot — he took that and steam-engined it into just more gregariousness and academic distinction. Even: our art teacher gave up Friday lessons to “Bible Jeopardy,” and though it was not Macheko’s sacred text — I think he was Zoroastrian — his team almost infallibly won. Lots of kids disliked young Macheko, and even more mocked him. Some went so far as to throw stones at him. Yet his exuberance only intensified. He had good things to say about everyone.

Once, for a weekend debate tournament, he and I were assigned to be partners, to be a team of two set to debate other teams of two. The debate topic was “A person has the right to die how and when he or she chooses.” We had to argue both Affirmative and Negative. For Negative, we focused on what we decided was the overlooked “how” of the proposition; it was a silly argument — as if the issue were people’s right to kill themselves by stepping into the middle of a freeway or by drowning themselves at a city pool — but a technically sound one, and we won all four rounds that day, easily. We knew we had to come up with a new set of rebuttals for what, by the second day of the tournament, would be premeditated counterarguments, and so late into the night, over fried okra and many teas at the local diner, we worked out ideas and arguments, at first about the debate topic and then slipping toward this, that, and the mark of Cain. “Innocent Abel has no descendants,” Macheko-son said, as if someone had inquired. “We forget that we’re all descendants of Cain, not Abel. It’s like each of us wears the mark of Cain, like each of us has killed our brother. And people think God marked Cain to shame him, but that’s not it.” Still no one was inquiring but he was responding. “The mark was to protect him. The mark meant that anyone who punished Cain would be punished by God sevenfold in return. It’s not for us to judge!” Macheko said. “Something like that.” We moved on, to other topics. Talking was easy. In some sense, we had a lot in common. Then, at around one o’clock in the morning, I don’t know how to describe what happened except to say that young Macheko gave me a look. Not a romantic look; it was more awful than that. He gave me a look that seemed to signal an imminent confession of Machekovian isolation and misery. A confession that, if I heard it, would draw me into an obligation I could not come even close to fulfilling. I would be a passing meal for an eternally starving golem, and I would be nothing else. “Whoa, I am so tired,” I said. “Jesus. It’s like somebody just hit me over the head with a club.” I left.

At the tournament the next day we lost the Negative rounds and won the Affirmative ones. For the rest of high school I avoided young Macheko, and I tried not to think of him in the twenty years following. I did hear that he hadn’t had the means to leave town for college, but that eventually the Macheko family had moved away — to somewhere, or to a few somewheres. I myself had also left and not returned.

* * *

Then last year I was down in Mexico City for a couple of weeks. I was going through an intense bout of fearfulness that is too irrational and stupid and elusive to explain, and I had done what my husband termed pulling a geographical. I realize it isn’t common to think of Mexico City as a haven from fear. Anyhow, there I could in conscience afford things I couldn’t normally afford because life was cheaper but not so very much cheaper that one felt awful all the time (though one felt somewhat bad). I found myself getting a manicure and a pedicure, which was weird for me, I don’t even like the look of manicured nails, and having a stranger attending to my cuticles with sharp and blunt objects: it just all feels very wrong. As I was engaged in this incorrectness, I found myself in conversation with a Mexican woman who was, she said, a television news reporter. Or rather, she used to be a television news reporter. Until she had gotten into a bad car accident. Followed by a long recovery period. She had become very depressed in that period and put on a lot of weight. Forty pounds! The television station told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she would need to take the weight off; they said they’d give her four months to do it. I was American, right? Oh, she knew my neighborhood in New York! because she had dated the grandson of Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer had lived there, hitting on her, yes, even from his deathbed, no, that relationship had not worked out, neither the one with Norman Mailer nor with the grandson of Norman Mailer. She was soon going to be covering the Mexican midterm elections, if all went well with the diet. She might have to go to Sinaloa, or Chihuahua, in any case to a place where the narco wars were very much alive. Her friend was in Juárez; he saw bodies in the streets. Well, that’s the North!

The young woman handling my feet tenderly asked me what color I wanted my toenails painted. The TV reporter asked me what was I doing in Mexico City.

I wasn’t feeling like myself, and the light was lumbering through the extra-thick window, bending into a bright diadem, which maybe explains how I found myself getting lime green toenails and saying I was writing a culture piece about Mexico City for a magazine. For The New York Times Magazine. I hadn’t really figured out what I would focus on; I was a little lost, to be honest.

Except for the bit about being lost, what I’d said was not true. I’m a molecular biologist, for one thing. I study epigenetics, things that alter expression of the genetic code but that aren’t themselves in the genetic code. It’s actually pretty interesting, I think, but it’s difficult to find a way to “chat” about it with strangers, it being difficult to chat about methylation and histones.

I know the perfect thing! the TV reporter said. You should write about me and my friends! She could show me a real circle of artists and writers. When she said circle — she had switched to speaking English; her colloquialisms were good — I thought for a moment she said circus. It sounds narcissistic, she laughed, but American readers would be very interested, and it would be very easy and fun for me, she explained, and it would really be a help to her, too, because she wanted to get a different kind of work, work in the U.S., work that she knew she’d be great at, and it was very difficult to live in Mexico just now; she loved Mexico, of course. There were enough negative stories about Mexico City, this would be a positive one! She just needed to lose a little more weight. And establish herself in the U.S. She was so lucky that she had met me. This was really going to be great.

I said that I, too, thought that sounded great.

I imagine that there are those who, even if it was misdirected, might at least briefly enjoy being an object upon which esteem and hope are projected. There are those who can be lighthearted about a basic deception and/or error and either correct it or just go with it and then even do whatever little thing they can do to give the people around them what they want or need and who can then handle whatever disappointment ensues. Some people might not find that even someone’s minimal excitement about them provokes imaginings of that scene, which may or may not be in Dante but is certainly somewhere in my education, where the narrator is in some boat, crossing some river into the underworld, maybe the Styx, or Lethe, and the dead souls in the river are clamoring to get aboard, though of course they will not be able to get aboard, because they are the damned, whereas the narrator is still alive and not yet judged. When heading out to meet Annalise (that was her name) the next day, I might even have thought briefly of Manuel Macheko. Or at least of that gold-jacketed book, of those letters obliquely asking for help, and setting out on journeys from which news might or might not return.

Or maybe I didn’t think of Macheko’s book. Maybe it was only in retrospect that I thought of the Machekos.

* * *

I arrived at a crowded cantina in the Condesa neighborhood. People were gathered to watch Mexico versus France in the World Cup. “This is my great friend Alice!” Annalise said, introducing me around a table crowded with good-looking people, a number of them wearing glasses with “personality.” She then followed up with further biographical details about me, most untrue, some of which I was not even responsible for having related to her. My name is not Alice, but to be fair, I had told Annalise that it was. Someone at the table ran an art gallery; someone was studying architecture at Yale; or maybe his girlfriend was doing that, and he was in a rock band; someone had on a very nice suit jacket over a seafoam-colored shirt. The cantina was noisy with cheer and chatter. A corn and cream snack showed up at the table, looking somehow luxurious in little tumblers, with a sprinkle of hot pepper. A round of mescal was ordered! A goal was scored! The cantina patrons stood up and cheered. Little kazoos were being blown.

“The narcos don’t want Mexico to win,” the rock musician or architecture student explained to me. “It makes the people confident. They start expecting things.” The woman next to him, who looked maybe one-quarter Indian and was tiny, under five feet — this made her otherwise straightforward beauty otherworldly — had recently finished an art project called Canned Laughter, cans that said “laughter” on them.

“This is what Uribe did in Colombia,” a drunk older man said to me. “He killed every single one of them. Not just the narcos, but anyone associated with the narcos. A narco accountant. A narco driver. A narco nephrologist. All of them. You have to kill them all. Then you can let them come back, slowly, because of course there will always be a narco business. But you can’t let them think they own the country.”

“You can’t just put them in jail?” I asked.

“Jail is like Club Med for them,” he said. He had wide-set brown eyes, and upon reflection, he was kind of handsome. There were more drinks. I started not to mind whatever was said, including “It’s so important for people to know what’s what. I wrote a poem about it.”

“It’s so good that you can show how involved the arts are here with the real world,” Annalise said to me. “About the situations in which we produce, our means of production. I’m so, so happy that you’re here.” Even more snacks came to the table. I felt bad for Annalise, trying to lose weight in a drinking and snacking culture.

And not much later that was the end of it. That was the afternoon. Mexico won the game. I was drunk.

I took a long nap. In my dream, I walked into some sort of cantina or bar or pool hall or all of those things, and my father was there, though his face was that of my husband. I had two young boyfriends, or just young male companions, with me. The thing that was weird about my father’s being there was that he is dead, and this was true even in the dream, and so what was he doing there, mobile and breathing? I went ahead and approached him, in the middle of his pool game. He had his own face now. “Why didn’t you at least call to say you were still alive?” I asked. “At least a phone call. A letter. Something.” He didn’t really say much in return. In (dream) fact, he said nothing. Nor did my manifestation or questioning appear to startle or disturb him. His face — now it was my husband’s face again — was pale, and he shrugged his shoulders and went back to his pool game. I wondered if he was mentally well. Then I called my mom and my sister, from a public telephone that was there in the bar, to tell them the news — that the head of our family was alive. They already knew; they had always known. Why hadn’t they told me? “He was dead to us. We were hiding nothing.”

I woke up not sweating, but very thirsty. I saw that my husband had called, but I didn’t return the call.

* * *

Around 10:00 p.m., I arrived at another cantina. A smaller group was gathered. Annalise spotted me at the entrance, got up from her seat, ran over to hug me, and also gave me three cheek kisses. The physical affection made me feel companioned and safe in the world, even as in my heart I was supposedly very skeptical of her affection, or really, of late, anyone’s affection. And even as her affection was directed to a falsely named and attributed me. The crowd was already rowdy. A plate of limes was accidentally knocked over. I ordered just a single beer; it arrived alongside a free shot of tequila. Someone was shouting angrily about peccaries. Or about Gregory Peck movies? Someone patted my knee. Over the bar, a small television was showing a rerun of the soccer match from earlier in the day. The patrons still cheered at the game’s key moments, as if the game were live, its outcome unknown. I cheered, too. Ordering another beer, I wondered about both my own and Annalise’s waistline. Perhaps this was the start of a genuine empathy?

There was a three-man band — two large guitars, a washboard with an attached harmonica — that came by the table, sang a corrido, took their tip, then went back to hanging around closer to the bar itself, watching the tiny television. When a new group of patrons arrived, the band went over to them, not immediately, but soon enough, to play again.

I heard shouting at the entrance.

The entrance doors were saloon doors, though I hadn’t noticed that when I myself had entered.

Annalise ran up to a man there at the entrance. To stop him? Was he angry? Dangerous? They kissed one another’s cheeks, maybe ten or fifteen times, although not like lovers, or like former lovers, or like anything like that.

“You know who that is, right?” someone sitting near me said.

“No,” I said.

“That’s Manuel Macheko,” he said.

Or at least I heard him say Manuel Macheko. I felt sweaty, and afflicted by a ringing sound that no one else seemed to register, and also as if someone I long trusted had revealed his willingness to throw me to the dogs. Was it just the remnants of my dream talking to me? Was I really haunted by Manuel Macheko? “Who did you say that was?”

“You know, he was a great friend of bunuelos. And also of monkey vice.”

Or, again: I heard him say bunuelos and monkey vice. I was pretty sure bunuelos was Spanish for “little doughnuts.” Then I realized, no, he had said Bolaño. I had at least heard of Bolaño. As for Monkey Vice, I made no progress in rehearing that into a more reasonable name. Instead, I just heard monkey vice, monkey vice, monkey vice. I was able to deduce that this Monkey Vice was a relatively recently dead intellectual of considerable stature. Who had loved cats. Someone very beloved. Whom everyone now wished they could say that they had known well. It became obvious to me that I would seem like a loser and perhaps a colonialist if I let on that I had no idea about the venerable Monkey Vice, and only a dim rumored sense of Bolaño — these men who cast, even from their graves, a glow upon the Manuel Macheko with whom Annalise was walking back to our table. Whose life was this? Not mine.

“The name is Manuel Macheko?” I confirmed quietly with the man on my right.

“Yes, yes, Manuel Macheko,” he repeated.

Up close, this Macheko was an unusually short, ugly, and joyous-looking man. I didn’t recognize him. But I had never met the father of the young Macheko. This Mexican Macheko was not as dark as the young Macheko. I couldn’t securely assign any ethnicity to the man there before me, though I can reliably say that I wouldn’t have not believed the man in front of me was native Mexican — probably mestizo — nor would I have not believed that he was Persian. All I had as a compare was a fallible memory of the cover of the Machekan correspondence book, in which the author had appeared as an inked cartoon sketch of a man with a small mustache, sitting at a typewriter with an unfurling paper scroll upon which could be made out the names of well-knowns. Not very pathognomonic. And why had I never before wondered why a Persian man had taken a Hispanic pseudonym?

“To see him alive is always like a miracle,” Annalise whispered into my ear. Macheko was standing and shouting at the little television with a raised fist. The coach of the Mexican team is a Communist! He only plays the old broken-down players! He’s punishing the young stars for their big contracts in Europe! Mexico would never go far with this asshole making decisions! Then, fatigued, Macheko sat down. I couldn’t tell if he was familiar with the result of the game or not. The musicians came by. He tipped them well and requested what proved to be a very short song. A candy vendor came by; Macheko bought a pack of mint gum from him, offered it around the table, then put it in his pocket, having taken none. In a more rapid Spanish than usual, which I couldn’t follow so well, Annalise introduced Macheko to me. She called me a brilliant journalist, I think. Macheko kissed my face several times.

I wanted to ask him if he had ever taught at the University of Oklahoma or if he had a son who played trumpet. Alice, however, did not want to ask. And I was Alice.

Macheko ordered a round of beers for the table, each one of which again came with a shot of tequila. He was reilluminated as he spoke to me. There was some notion in the air that I could be of tremendous help, though again I couldn’t really follow; the cantina had only become noisier and more crowded. Macheko had written an account about a headless something? Why it hadn’t yet been translated into English was just for some fucking reason and because people were cowards?

I said: Didn’t you write some sort of set of letters? Letters in English?

He simultaneously ignored me and kept speaking to me. He could do the English translation himself! They wouldn’t even have to pay a translator! Fuck his other projects, this was his most important work! Macheko’s Spanish sounded less Mexican, more something else that I couldn’t place, but I’m not in truth so very good at placing accents. I once asked Germans if they were Canadians. We were interrupted by a man wearing what looked like an accordion connected to what looked like two ends of jump rope with metal handles. Macheko talked the man down from thirty to twenty pesos. Then he stood up, took hold of the handles, and flexed his upper body in what appeared to be agony. This went on for what seemed to me like a long time, though probably it was less than ten seconds. The contraption was an electric shock machine. Macheko declared he felt much more awake now, much better.

“Take, take, you’re welcome to it,” Macheko then said, bringing out handfuls of little plastic bags of white powder and throwing them onto the table. “It’s also a good way to wake up.” He left the bags there as he headed to saloon-doored bathrooms in the back.

A man on my right explained to me that Mexico City had very clean, very inexpensive cocaine because everything passed through there, did I know that?

Upon his return, Macheko said to me that it was so wonderful that I was in Mexico, that I was obviously a good woman.

I did feel that he was staring at me with a kind of intimacy that exceeded the situation. Maybe he stared at me with recognition. Or with a desire to be recognized? Could he see my father’s face in mine? Maybe his look was a petition of some sort. A cry for help?

Then he said he had to go, and he was gone.

* * *

I stayed on awhile, past the end of the replay of the soccer game. You have to help him, Annalise said. He has a metal plate in his head. Another table member nodded in agreement. It was communicated to me that Macheko was the guy who had investigated those hundreds of murders of women in Juárez. Who else had the courage to do that? He was the guy who said to Monkey Vice: It’s not a serial killer. Not a serial killer, but part of the sick culture there. It was from him that Bolaño took the famous line in his novel, the one where the woman says, “¡No somos putas, somos obreras!” We’re not whores, we’re workers! Someone said there were narco kids who thought it was a laugh, or maybe it was an initiation, to shoot a woman in the head while fucking her in the ass, for a special sensation. It needed to be widely known. The metal plate was mentioned again. It was something to do with some time when Macheko was beaten to the edge of his life, left for dead.

I knew it was wrong that I judged these people, mostly negatively, for being both fashionable and emanating flashily unflashy wealth and being interested in “real” life — but it was also real! — in this way; Macheko, the trumpeter and debater, was telling me across the years that there was no place for judgment, not of any kind. Is Macheko from around here? I asked. Oh, he had lived everywhere. He had even lived in Texas, someone said, but something had gone wrong with his green card. Macheko had a secret hideout in his home; the hideout was wall-to-wall books; it could be the home of Edward Said, that was the quality of the books; you could live there for a hundred years. He does so much work! He won’t survive if he stays here. Eventually they’ll decide to get him. You can help him, I was being told. You’re the one who can. You’ll bring attention to him. Then he’ll get his work published in English. They’ll celebrate him as a hero; they’ll give him a job and a green card and everything. That was the power of those American magazines. They already love Bolaño in America. They respect Monkey Vice. You should go north with him. You can report on his reporting. It can definitely work. Alice, you can make this happen.

Alice said, Yes, you’re right. It’s important, I’ll do whatever I can.

* * *

Back in my plain-walled Mexican room, I tried to search for the person I had encountered. My initial Internet searching yielded no Machekos teaching in a chemical engineering department, which was the department from which the corresponder had been fired. I did find a soccer player with the name. Also an empty LinkedIn profile. Not only am I an ineffective Internet searcher, but clicking through a few pages on the Internet makes me feel as if I haven’t slept for days. My husband is immeasurably better at such things.

It was three o’clock in the morning. I called him.

To my joy and surprise, he answered.

I explained about the original Macheko book. Then I described, in a limited way, this other Macheko — some Mexican journalist, I said.

“I’m looking,” he said. My husband couldn’t find Macheko books of any kind. But then, no, he found a copy of the self-published correspondence book on a used books site. It was listed for ninety-one dollars.

I asked if there weren’t any other books by the same writer? Or a writer with a similarly spelled name? Had he looked, specifically, for books written in Spanish as well?

“Don’t you think,” my husband said, “that this being what makes you pick up the phone is a little bizarre? You basically vanish, you don’t explain yourself, we don’t know when you’re coming back, and then, when you do call—”

I thought for a moment to ask after our daughter at that point, but I knew that would just seem defensive, probably even be defensive, seeing as I felt pretty sure about how she was doing; children, I remember this from my own experience, are, I think, very resilient and flexible, and one shouldn’t let people tell one otherwise.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I panicked.”

“It’s not just me you should talk to,” he said.

“I get it,” I said.

“You must get it and then forget it.”

“I can only panic so many times. It’s not fair to you.”

“It’s not really about fair or not fair. I need you. I really do. But eventually my body will figure it out, that it’s no good to need you, and then I won’t need you anymore. It’ll be like a terrible cure.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

After some quiet, maybe with or without shuffling, he said, “You know what I can do for you? I can contact the seller. There’s a way to do that. Who knows, maybe pz21147 can answer all your questions. Do you want me to contact him?”

I said that yes, I would really appreciate that. I said, “They have this thing here, these orange slices that they serve with paprika; it’s really tasty; I’ll prepare it for you when I come back.”

“I’m tired,” he said.

One of the more frustrating traits of my husband was how well he understood me. I had long thought of Macheko as someone seeking contact. But maybe not. Maybe those letters were part of building a hermitage. Maybe Macheko wrote to glittering strangers not with the unreasonable hope that they would see and know him but, rather, with the really quite reasonable hope that he would make contact with people who would almost certainly not know or truly see him, even if they did respond. I understand how that might appeal. I remember when I discovered that my father had kept secret from us years of working at a campus suicide hotline. He was always late coming home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and one day I saw his car parked and went and investigated. I kept his secret a secret. I accustomed myself to the idea of my dad’s listening to girls at slumber parties prank calling, and to lonelies who had lost jobs and lovers, and to those energetic people who must have abused him as heartless if he suggested that they visit an emergency room or accept an appointment to see a therapist the next day. I later also learned that my dad offered free tax advice for the poor in a booth set up every spring outside the Wal-Mart. He helped get green cards for students from China who really had no relationship to his field. I had known none of this. After he died, I found among his papers all sorts of elaborate thank-you letters he had received. Also a grievance list, by him, of ways he had been misunderstood and underappreciated by us, his family. Most of his complaints seemed valid; we had criticized him for eating more than his share of a bowl of almonds set out as a snack at a neighbor’s dinner, for example. In person, my dad could barely make eye contact, and took his dinner while watching PBS at high volume in the living room. But I remember going to the Denny’s with him once and the waitress there calling him by his first name and putting unasked-for whipped cream and strawberry sauce on my waffle. The approval and gratitude of near-strangers can be a kind of drug; or maybe it’s fair to use the term “medicine.”

Anyhow, there were four more days of Annalise and her crowd. Annalise had a sick mother to support. The architecture student confessed to a fear of being kidnapped a second time. Macheko did not re-surface; no one was sure of his whereabouts. Maybe he had gone back north. Alice eventually flew back home and was not heard from again. I judged her, but I also told myself that I shouldn’t judge; I said to myself that Macheko’s friends could put together a Wikipedia page for him on their own, if attention was what was needed. I continued with my more objective researches. Pz21147 turned out to be a bookseller in Springfield, Missouri, whose books were priced by an algorithm, and who knew nothing about the origins of his copy of The Collected Correspondence.

* * *

About a year after the Mexico episode, I learned something of the fate of the original young Macheko. The wife of a colleague of mine met him. In fact, she worked under him. Young Macheko, it turned out, had gone to graduate school in music at Juilliard. For trumpet. He had married a woman who sang opera; on weekends he rode long distances on his motorcycle; he was the energetic new dean of the arts at the university where this wife of my colleague taught.

These were happy-sounding details; I recognized young Macheko’s metabolism in them even if the particulars surprised me. “He’s a great guy,” I was told. “He’s one of those makes-things-happen people. Maybe a little Teflon-y, sure, like you never feel like you can make genuine contact. But fun. And generous. He says to say hi. I told him maybe we could all get together. He was a little weird about that. He told me an interesting story, though.”

In the eleventh grade the English classes at our high school spent three weeks studying Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison is said to have been aloof toward aspiring black artists and intellectuals, and to have been charming with and beloved among whites. That’s what they say. Ellison was from Oklahoma, from a town not far from where Macheko and I grew up. Ellison’s father worked delivering ice, and died from a work accident — impaled on a cleaved ice shard — when Ellison was just three. His mother then worked a miscellany of jobs, of which little Ellison was ashamed. The “battle royal” scene near the opening of Invisible Man, in which the young black boys are set up to fight one another blindfolded in order to entertain a gathering of white community leaders who are giving them small scholarships, is roughly autobiographical. At eighteen Ellison jumped a freight train to Alabama to attend Tuskegee University, where he was a music major and played trumpet. In later life Ellison became nostalgic for his home state. Turn of the century Oklahoma — Ellison’s Oklahoma — had at least twenty-eight all-black towns, with their own newspapers and schools, and many of those communities were prosperous. Those towns have since vanished; when a book of Oklahoma ghost towns was put out, those towns were absent even from that book. Shortly before Ralph Ellison himself died, young Macheko, having just studied Invisible Man, went to the public library, took out a New York City phone book, and found a listing for “Ellison, R.” He called. A woman answered. The sixteen-year-old asked to speak with Mr. Ellison. She said to hold on a moment. Macheko and Ellison then spoke for more than two hours. About all the things they had in common.

I admired Macheko-son. He had improved upon his father’s methodology. That was a tribute. I was not honoring my line as well.