Word Made Flesh

20

The envelope is held out by one of the tinker children, a young boy, maybe seven, eight years old, filthy and with sores all over the face from where he’s picked at insect bites. He’s sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Checker. Gilrein passes the child a five-dollar bill slowly, without any jarring moves. The boy grabs the bill at the same moment he releases the letter and then jumps off the cab and runs around the back of the diner.

Gilrein slides a finger under the seal of the envelope, pulls out a sheaf of pages, unfolds them, and reads:

Langer, the Coward of Maisel

c/o Booth One

Independent Cabdrivers’ Collective

Tang’s Visitation Diner

City

Gilrein, the (Faux) Exile of Quinsigamond

c/o Sanctuary, Ltd.

Brockden Farm

City

The Midnight Hour

My Dear Gilrein:

This is the testament of a survivor. I use these particular words after much deliberation. Testament. Survivor. I use them for my purposes and I use them understanding, from the beginning, that my purposes may not be your purposes.

Shall I tell you a secret — excuse me, I was about to write “my friend.” A force of habit. Do you understand? What you would call a phraseology. We are not friends, Gilrein. This is my first confession of the night. Confession, that is from your tradition. You Catholics. You clear your soul with each trip to the box, with each transaction. Penance for absolution. Where I come from there is nothing so convenient.

Do you know the story of the Italian Jew? The poet from Turin? What was the name? Malaban? Something like this. It was in all the papers several years ago. Even here, in this bastion of reclusiveness. Only an inch of print on page twenty-two. Off the international wire. But you must have seen it. He was a writer of some renown. Had survived the ordeal at Auschwitz. Spared, apparently, when the Nazis learned of his training as a chemist. And then, forty years later, he chose to throw himself down the stairway of the home in which he had grown up. The general explanation was that he could no longer tolerate the guilt. The shame of the survivor. The remorse of the living. It’s a sad story, yes, Gilrein? You would agree? It points out the difference between the real exile and the imposter. You young men who think that because you can renounce the state and the church and the family ties that bind your freedom, you think that because you can throw off these manacles of history and conscience and love you are instantly a deportee. The despised outcast. The hated beast pushed from the village, stones and rotten fruit pelting off his back as he runs into the serpent’s forest.

You know nothing.

And your arrogance is an insult to the true outcast. You brooding romantics are more dangerous than the fascists in some ways. Can you even understand what words like mine mean in a world this hateful and corrupt, this confused as to the real and the illusory? TESTAMENT. SURVIVOR. The burden is inescapable. And unbearable.

You thought we were comrades in our great struggle against the corporate monsters, yes? You thought we would fight together, you and I and Miss Jocasta. The last of the independents. That we were a collective David who could bring down the Red and Black Goliaths. So pathetic I do not know whether to laugh or vomit. You lover of sto ries.

At the Cabaret, I asked the audience a question. Do you remember, Mister Exile? I asked if anyone present could submit to the same kind of trial that the girl, Alicia, forced herself through. I tried to look out at the faces in the crowd, but with the spotlight, well, you can imagine my difficulty. So I could only answer for myself.

I could not submit to the test Alicia willingly took.

And I did not.

Do I anticipate you? Are you already asking yourself — how does he know all that he knows? It is a perceptive question for a cabdriver. If the girl was the only witness, how can Langer know these details?

Perhaps I am making the whole thing up. Isn’t that the easiest answer? In any event, you will have to bear with me, Gilrein. This is the price one must pay for being on the receiving end of the story. There is profit and loss in each transaction. And I am forced, by my experience, by my view of the world at this advanced age, to label story-telling — what others might call an art — simply another transaction. I would allow that it is a purchase and sale steeped in tradition, in history, and birthed in the bloody membrane of our collective, superstitious unconscious. But it is still NOTHING more than a covenant. Between the one who has the specific words. And the one who does not.

Can you guess which category you fall into, Mister Gilrein?

Are you beginning, finally, to see why I hate you so much? Can you imagine all those nights I spent at that miserable table at Tang’s Diner, looking across at you, the loss of your precious wife always barely, badly, concealed just beneath the skin of your forehead. Like a tumor. A growth. A parasite that I could see bulging against the enclosure of your skull, the prison of your bone and flesh. All your small talk, detailing night after night the fares that rode in the back of your father’s Checker — it will never be yours, Gilrein — the supposedly funny stories. The allegedly petty outrages of backseat couplings and forgotten tips. As you gulped down one more cup of coffee. And all the time the memory of that woman — the wife you buried along with your meaning — pulsed like the third eye in the center of your pathetic face. Such a mundane, pitiful Cyclops you made.

And such a horrible and perfect mirror.

No glass could be more polished and true. I hated you because I saw myself each time I looked in your direction. Did you ever bother to see the tumor fighting to explode from my own head? Even now, I would bet my cab that you have no idea what I am talking about. How did you ever last on the police force, Gilrein? What does this say about our city that you not only wore the uniform, but were promoted?

Jocasta always wanted to hear the stories from your days working bunko. Such a funny term, “bunko.” And such an inappropriate place for one like you, cabdriver. As if Gilrein could determine the true from the false. As if this taxi-boy could ever, with all the time in this godless universe, find a way to separate, truly and surely, the real from the illusory.

Reach out to the mirror, Gilrein, and take this cup. I move it now from my hands to yours. This is part of your tradition, not mine. I was an Old Testament Jew. You are the New Testament fool. Turn the cheek and drink the sweet wine, taxi-boy. One more transaction you engage in without knowing the value of the goods involved.

Drink deeply:

Alicia kept her eyes open in a way you or I could never manage. She stayed behind the window and she never blinked while below her, they not only killed every single man and woman and child in Schiller Avenue, but insisted on erasing any trace of the Ezzenes’ existence. The soldiers actually grew tired from watching the Obliterator, had to work in shifts, take breaks, sit on the ground and smoke cigarettes, call out and point to a specific figure within the mass convulsion, a toddler in blind panic struggling to find its swallowed mother. Critique each course of the machine’s endless buffet. And Alicia watched from the attic window, helpless, and let herself be bombarded by images that were instantly transforming her into something else. A horrible and irreversible transformation. She did not blink.

And then, for three days she managed to stay hidden and awake. She gathered together every loose scrap of paper she could find in the attic. She took the pens and pencils from the soup can on her checkout desk and she began to write. She wrote as quickly as her hand could form the symbols on the page. She ignored the muscle cramp that, toward the end, would cause permanent damage to certain nerves near the base of the wrist and bring her final pages to the brink of illegibility. But she never crossed the line into illegibility. Every word, no matter how smeared and sloppy, proved legible. Completely readable. You must believe me on this point. Or, depending on the stage of our transaction at this time, you may be able to look for yourself. But I do not advise this. Remember that you have been warned. Like Lot’s wife.

Alicia found words to tell the story of the Erasure.

Now understand, and this may be the most important thing I have to tell you, Gilrein, she did not write down the facts. She did not transcribe what she saw through the window of the library. She did not relate, in words, the events that took place in Schiller Avenue on that humid night in July. She did not make a diary nor a journal. She did not engage in reportage. She wrote, instead, what we might agree to call a fiction. She told a story. Created a myth. She transformed what she had seen in the same way that she had been transformed by what she had seen. If I had anyone else to rely on, I would. But I have only you — this New World/New Testament reflection of my own self-loathing. You MUST understand this, Gilrein.What the girl wrote was something so far beyond accounting. Beyond simple journalism. She made her witnessing into a horrible art. She made a weapon of her epiphany and her transmutation. She created an evolutionary virus out of ink and paper. She put air into a trumpet that could shatter each frozen soul to hear its agonizing music.

I do not mean to be poetic. Poetry is the last thing I mean to give you. I do not want you to look for multiple levels of meaning.

I’m lying, Gilrein. Of course I want you to search between the lines. Of course I do. No act of transcription is innocent.

And neither is Alicia’s Testament. It is a necessary slap in the form of a story. I realize, as you must, that it is too late for me. And I have every reason to believe it is also too late for you. You are already a ghost. You seem one of those transient spirits that cannot exist in the material world, yet neither can he find a way into the other world.

The other world. As if such a thing could exist. As if all the Edens of all our dreams could be anything but a myth we create to numb the crushing banality of our own viciousness. As if there were an alternative to the truth that the whole teeming lot of us is just no damn good.

If you buck against my last statement, then perhaps there is a hope for you that I have been unable to see. If you think the existence of Alicia’s Testament matters in the end, then perhaps you are not the perfect mirror I have imagined you to be. Whatever the case, it is in your hands now. It feels like a corpse and it smells like vinegar.

At the end of the third day, Alicia collapsed into sleep. The pen was still clutched in her hand. The hand was stained a deep blue. The muscles beneath the skin of the writing hand were wrenched past cramp and into a kind of nerve-damaged twitch, jerking and lurching at the end of the girl’s arm, as if manipulated by strings from some unseen dimension. Even in this kind of comalike sleep, born of shock-trauma, while the rest of the body lay prone, the hand continued to move, locked in a loop of its own particular dream. It played and replayed a Sisyphean nightmare where it endlessly formed a bottomless well of blood into signs and symbols and ideograms comprised of lines and loops and crosses and curves, and though the hand knew instinctually how to construct these characters, it could never find illumination as to their meaning, what the ink lines on the page represented in the scheme of some other, hidden world.

This is how the Censor’s men found her. Teams had been moving from building to building, stripping anything of value for the State Treasury and dousing what remained with a generous bath of gasoline. Meyrink had set his most trusted stooges to secure the attic library of the Levi and word was given that nothing was to be touched until the Chief Expurgator himself arrived on the scene.

When he climbed the stairs and, near the top floor, came to smell that unmistakable redolence of old paper, worn and slightly musty pages, beaten leather, that unique variety of slightly acrid perfume that incenses a room long filled with used books, the Censor of Maisel stopped and let it wash over him and felt the excitement of the addicted in the abundant presence of their opiate. He stood outside the doorway, eyes closed, the sound of his nose in full exertion alerting the soldiers within of his approach. When he stepped through the library entrance and found his men circled like fascist dwarfs around Snow White, his anticipatory delight was transformed instantly from the anarchistic desire of the looter into the anal responsibility of the authoritarian.

“What in the world do we have here?” he asked the room in general.

And his youngest attendant, a boy we now believe was named Moltke, innocently replied, “A survivor, sir.”

He gave the boy a look more withering than satisfied and asked, “How did this happen? I was told every room was searched.”

This time Moltke stayed silent and kept his eyes on the sleeping body and it was up to another to volunteer, “She must have been hiding, sir.”

But Meyrink wasn’t listening. He had spotted the scraps of paper spread around Alicia and was stooping to pick up a random sheet. Now, Gilrein, I have gone back and forth as to whether I am thankful that I will never know what went through Meyrink’s mind in the seconds that he read some chance run of words from Alicia’s Testament or whether, in fact, I am hopelessly regretful that his thoughts will always be lost to me. I have felt both ways. There have been days when I remember the warning of greater minds than my own never to look too long nor too deeply into the face of a monster. Yet, of course, other giants of cogitation have insisted that only by inhabiting the mind of the beast can we demythologize him and deal with him on our own, earthly terms. It is a debate that you, too, will soon have to engage in, I would think. But, though you may or may not wish to follow my lead, I have finally decided that, in the absence of ever truly knowing what the Censor thought and felt upon discovering Alicia, and more important, discovering her gospel, I will imagine what seems most likely.

And I think that Meyrink loved what he found on the floor. I think he was thrilled with the manner in which his words and deeds had been elevated to STORY. I believe he was moved and honored and exhilarated by the idea that the banal reality of the Erasure had already, almost instantly, been mutated into a kind of legend, a myth that made use of all the essential elements — life and death and language and hatred and power. And within this new myth, he, Meyrink, the Censor of Maisel, was pulled along by the force of the story and carried, somehow, to its center, its igniting spark, the initial word that provoked all that came next. I think Meyrink held a piece of Alicia’s credo between his hands, fingers taut in the margins of the paper, and I think he was stunned by this new, epiphanizing fable of what had been a bloody detail handed to a faceless bureaucrat. A moment before his mission was set into motion, Meyrink had been just one more Vice Chancellor of Expurgation occupying a cubicle office in the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda, Division of Official Indexing, Bureau of Standards and Decorum. And by the end of his chore, once every voice in the Schiller had been silenced, every eye permanently closed, he had been made into a monster of historic proportions, the kind of icon that is needed, every so often, to give the masses a ready, easily accessible definition of undiluted evil.

I think he could have bent down and kissed Alicia. I think he wanted, more than anything else that he’d discovered this far into his small life, to become the prince of eternal darkness in the dreams of the unconscious beauty at his feet.

He got on his knees and began to gather all the disparate papers together, attempting to shuffle them into some kind of order. At one point one of his men tried to bend down and help and the Censor screamed for the soldier to come to attention. He wanted no hands but his own to come in contact with the manuscript. Every few pages that he collected, he would stop for just a second and read a line or two from the topmost sheet, then, flushed and making a slight grunting noise, he would go back to his hunt. When he had found all the pages and double-checked under books and produce crates that there were no stray leaves, he sat on the floor and lay the stack of writing in his lap. There was suddenly a very antsy and nervous air about him, something that combined with his fatigue and exhaustion from working without sleep for too long. He put one hand flat on the manuscript, reached his other into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a set of keys, which he tossed through the air to Moltke. Then he quietly addressed his men, in a tone that was more request than order, instructing them to wrap the girl in a blanket and take her to his home.

Moltke began to protest with a reminder of the final paragraph in the Orders of Erasure, but the Censor silenced his underling with a hand on the shoulder.

A deputy named Varnbuler quietly, perhaps even challengingly, asked, “Don’tyou mean that we should take the prisoner to your office?”

Meyrink met his stare and even from a sitting position, willed it down.

“That is not what I said. And that is not what I meant.”

No one spoke. Meyrink walked to a bed and stripped it of a blanket. Alicia stirred momentarily as they rolled her in it, and then without any further instructions they lifted her under their arms like a battering ram and exited the library.

Meyrink sat in the center of the attic and slowly, methodically began to collate the manuscript into its logical sequence. This accomplished, he began at page one and read to the end, through the sections where Alicia’s handwriting changes from her normal flowing scroll to a combined printing and writing and finally into a chaotic mess of abbreviations, unique shorthand, dropped vowels, letters slanting up and down the page, sentences running in counterclockwise circles around the block of main text, cross-outs, splotches of spilled ink, grievous misspellings, a complete lack of punctuation, and grammar made eccentric to the brink of unintelligibility.

He read it all and found himself excited to the point of physical manifestation. He felt empowered in a profound and virginal way. Alicia had single-handedly rewritten an image of himself that he had been unable to create in his entire glacial lifetime. With her eyes and ears and pen, the sleeping girl had erased everything about the Censor’s life that had come before and forged his entire being anew.

I am forced to confess, my hand grows tired. An honest man can find the nerve to admit anything.

Do you know what I think insomnia is, my independent brother? I believe it is a terror so profound that the body would rather decay, would rather cave in upon itself from exhaustion, than ride one more time into the dreams of the demon.

Do you know what I think a migraine is, Gilrein? I think it is the weight of the victims, the corpses, the bones of the despised, pushing, more pressure each night, upon the skull of the survivor.

Do you know of an antidote for these exquisite trials, taxi-boy? You give it some thought. Perhaps you can help me when we meet again, my twin. In the meantime, I have to silence another old man making promises that can’t possibly be kept.

Culpably yours,

Otto Langer