I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 9. Squatters

Five in the morning. Will’m stood among ovens and large iron machines, unfurling canvas stored in a hard long tube. The hawk-nosed baker, Gilles Mott, held the bird-and-berry scene (the very same depicted in the “Cadillac” ’s mural) carefully in flour-dusted hands, an auctioneer apprizing maps of a medieval world.

“It’s very detailed,” he remarked. “Is it a painting?”

“Fabric, man — one of our more popular patterns. We call it the Strawberry Thief. Indigo-discharge on block-printed cotton. That’s what stained me blue!”

He waved his arms, which, at shoulder joint, were thick as cadets’ thighs, but Gilles saw no dye. The baker did think it an amazing business, though: this colored parchment with inked green foliage shot through by cocky thrushes, their beaks cadging strawberries hung from tendrils like swollen lanterns.

“Will’m … you’ve been to France, no?”

“I’m not fond of the Frankish tongue nor Frankish things.”

He rolled up the “Thief” and replaced it in the scabbard. For a moment, the baker worried his segue had offended, but an old memory stubbornly asserted itself.

Will’m unceremoniously began mopping the concrete. For this and other chores, Gilles paid him minimum wage plus bread, scones and other delectables. Once in a while, the mystery man announced the urge to bake; on such days, his startled benefactor wisely sat back to watch artistry unfold. Tossing off scintillating ciabatta and pane pugliese as if it were child’s play, his skill with sweet things was elysian — it was during one of those rare incursions that Bluey’s recent favorite, the mille-feuille of almonds and pomegranates, was born, and christened The Persephone. (If only the old woman knew, thought the baker, the circumstances of its preparation.) Yet whenever Gilles offered steady work, the prodigy angrily balked. He soon gave up his entreaties, fearing the man would never come around again.

“You’d look amazing there,” said Gilles. “I mean, in France. The French would love you. They wouldn’t know what to make of you, but they’d love you. That pattern made me think of something. My fiancée and I were having a look around Paris. An arrondissement near the Père-Lachaise — the famous cemetery. Every cemetery in France is famous. We thought we could run into Marlene Dietrich, who supposedly lived in an apartment house nearby; we were a little drunk. We finally found the place and stood knocking for fifteen minutes.” A polite listener, the transient leaned on the mop to hear him out. “We were just about to leave when a middle-aged woman came to the door. Not Marlene. What I remember were her eyes: dilated. One of those opium eaters. She looked like a fish coming at you from twenty thousand leagues. We followed her down — she floated down — to a six-hundred-year-old wine cellar. Well, we turned the corner and eighteen people looked up and stared. An amazing shock. Their eyes peeked over napkins; they were covering their faces like dignitaries caught in a raid. And formally dressed! Very Discreet Charm, do you know Buñuel? He was a Spaniard — an Andalusian, actually. Well, can I tell you what the occasion was? We later found out. It was a bunch of rich gourmands, and they had paid a huge amount of money to eat these songbirds. Little songbirds! Completely illegal — the birds were on the endangered species list. Very Kosinski, do you know him? Killed himself in the bath. Never had a tastier treat in my life: sweet, crunchy … bitter, too. My fiancée said they kept them in dark cages for months—”

“The dinner guests?”

“The birds! Gorged them on millet, then drowned them in snifters of Armagnac. And the reason they held up their napkins, so they said, was because you were supposed to eat the birds hot. You just popped them in and chewed with your mouth open or else you got burned.”

“That is the Frankish way, isn’t it? Murder a thrush behind veils of civility! Truth be told, the French are a dishonorable and troublously shoddy race.”

Gilles Mott had known the hulking homeless man for six months. He found him to be thoughtful, gentle and diligent at menial tasks, of which he neatly did a baker’s dozen. Gilles was something of a scholar of the fractured souls who wandered from dark and dirty wings onto his stage; of all the players he’d known, the one called Will’m was the most “accomplished.” He looked magnificent — his face had the ruddy plein air nobility of a streetwise sage, without the astringent lunacy in the eye. He was truculent but never uncivil. The hair swept back like a Big Sur poet’s (he said he was nicknamed for his locks; friends got Topsy from the slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and his beard grew like cliff bush over tweedy layers of dress, its wiry, earthen, sun-bleached colors blending with sport coat, vest and wan-pink debuttoned Brooks Brothers blouse fastened at collar with twine. How clothes were found to fit the dimensions of this man remained, for the baker, a puzzle. His voice too was distinctive, a contained whisper emanating from the citizens of a thousand nodal villages sitting upon cords buried deep as transatlantic cable within a meaty, blushing throat. Gilles thought of the self-averred Oxford-educated wanderer as a ghost who walked the urban heath, otherwise imagining him a character from H. G. Wells dislocated in Time. He worried about this tender mountain and keenly wondered about the origins of his elaborate personal myth. Like the student he was, Gilles nudged and probed, but not too hard — the baker’s wife, a volunteer caseworker herself, had cautioned him against it.

“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? Something — 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 everything 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.”

He loped over while Topsy stood on the patch of earth where his house had been. He closed his eyes and imagined the crosshatched honeycomb on the boxes — bugs and marigolds, hawthorn and snakes-head, hummingbirds, cabbage and eglantine that took weeks to evoke. He sighed; his enormous chest heaved skyward. He would not go to Misery House tonight. There was another place he knew, with rooms towering high above the city. As he set out, Half Dead barked halfheartedly while his master ranted against Sanitation and all Departments thereof.

Dusk: a zealous menagerie of untouchables traversed the bridge in a parody of corporate commuting. Where were they bound? Some gesticulated, some nearly loitered, most just rushed along. At least they might take the same direction — but this was a dystopian crusade, all fervor and no cause. At night they built fires at the curbs; by day, they were ticketed for jaywalking by latex-gloved police.

It was close to suppertime and he waded past Misery House and the Midnight Mission with their long lines of the wretched of the earth. A daffy civic-center sign — TOY DISTRICT — loomed on a sidewalk pole, the city’s lame, futile proclamation of a “famous” area. A few of the disenfranchised called hello from their boxes, for the man in tweed was well regarded on the street, and respected for his prodigious physical strength.

Someone-Help-Me gave a shout. Hassled by cops, he had abandoned his stint at the Hard Rock Cafe. He needed a new sign; Will’m made the last, a real crowd pleaser. The vagrant wanted it spruced and was not pleased his greeting went unreturned.

The hulking figure rounded the corner of St. Vibiana without glancing at the notice on the wall: CATHEDRAL CLOSED.

Darkness fell as he reached his destination, a beleaguered ten-story sandstone-finished façade, vacant for decades — brass knobs and piping long since purloined, with shardy windowpanes whose twisted blinds looked as if they’d gone mad before dying; a smell that knocked at the solar plexus, then gusted low over a hellish carpet of syringes, diapers and tampons, soiled to a man, gracing the once illustrious entrance of the Higgins Building, put up in 1910 by the eponymous Thomas H. — who’d made his fortune in copper, as, we may remind, had the father of the original William Morris. Our Will’m arched his neck to read the spray-painted legend

Isa 23—Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is laid waste,

so that there is no house, no entering in

then closed his eyes and imagined: saw women in high collars pass to and fro and bowler’d men from trolleys they called Red Cars: then buggies, bustle and Arrows (Arrows he had gathered from library visits). The main entry, reluctant to admit squatters who blackened marble and checkerboard mosaics with casual fires and human waste, had been welded shut, but Will’m knew another way — the alley.

Only a cat could slip through the twisted iron; so he twisted it more with brute hands, and took a minute to shimmy his large body through. Like a circus strongman, he closed the metal back behind him and went in, letting eyes adjust to the dark.

He made his way to the lobby, where the remnants of an announcement from a previous incarnation was glued to a long faux-wood slat:

Debris, shit and more shards. Tumbleweeds of newspaper flecked with concrete dust amid tangle of fluorescent tubes in cool dead brittle bunches. A gang of sullen, sleepy pigeons as he took the stairs, their panicked population increasing on the upper floors, where he headed. Perhaps they were the ones he’d find strutting on lintels in bowlers and high collars — then he’d know once and for all he was truly mad.

What did this place remind him of? Rather, to what place did he let himself drift back? The ruins of the gabled “old stone Elizabethan house” he called Kelmscott Manor … that place was near a bridge, too — Radcot Bridge, on the baby Thames. He thought of the estate as he climbed the littered steps, conjuring drawing room and attic, with rugs and upholstered furniture of his design: motifs of rose and thistle, corncockle and windrush, lily and pomegranate. His blood boiled recalling his dear friend Rossetti’s carryings-on with Janey … dear friend! Beautiful wife! That rankled him and, losing his footing on a droppings-slick landing, he stepped into a crowd of hot, feathered bodies and roared, sloppily killing two with a swat as they rose to escape.

He found a room on the ninth floor he had once used when the night was inclement. Will’m stood by the window a moment, peering at St. Vibiana’s battered cupola; wearily, he lowered himself onto scarred tiles. He heard voices of faceless old cohorts on the telephones and for a moment was not himself. I might yet work myself back, he thought — but what did “back” mean? From what? His duties as Chairman of the Disembodied? And to what? He puzzled, then something stirred behind a closet of besmirched and frosted glass — he would have to rout the animal out before sleep. He stood, opening the warped door to let it scamper: there crouched a wild-eyed girl. She saw his face and dissolved.

“Topsy!” She smiled, then began to laugh. “I was so scared—”

He reached out, and she tumbled to his arms. Her laughter turned to sobs. He held the orphan to his tweedy breast as she cried and cried, and (to his surprise) he along with her.