Word Made Flesh

5

While it is not a requirement for admittance, if you plan on visiting the Last Man Supper Club in Little Asia on karaoke night, it might be a good idea to brush up on your knowledge of pop standards. In a place where every possible human activity seems to have an analogous ritual, you can’t be too overprepared. Don’t imagine you’ll be carried out to the delivery platform and stomped by some Tang Family goons if you blow a line of, say, “Book of Love” when the microphone finally gets passed your way. But the name of the tune in any Tang establishment is respect. And on any given Thursday evening in the Last Man, respect might be measured by the extent of your familiarity with the poetry of teenage heartbreak.

It’s not that August Kroger is oblivious to the mores of this part of town. He’s transacted business along the Little Asia border long enough to pick up the required smattering of totems and taboos. And he’s at least an instinctual enough creature to sense the weight of Family power emanating from every doorway under Tang protection. It’s just that as a would-be neighborhood mayor, Kroger feels he can’t grovel, that the need for respect is a given, but groveling will come back to haunt you, plant an image that will one day undo every inch of bloody progress you’ve worked so hard to attain. And surely, for an independent businessman like August K, born into the sobering history of Old Bohemia, memorizing the chorus of “Big Girls Don’t Cry” must be considered in the realm of the grovel.

His personal assistant, however, would probably see things in a different light, but she’s too fresh in her career to have gained the confidence required to argue with the boss. Even in her current condition, halfway to sloshed on a house drink called a Granberry Morpheme. For all intents and purposes, Wylie Brown was hired by Kroger as his archivist and librarian, overseer of his magnificent collection of rare books and decorative papers. To her surprise and confusion she was promoted, just this morning, to the somewhat more vague position of general secretary.

Is Wylie aware that her advancement is really the result of Kroger’s newly discovered lust? It’s unlikely, given August’s unilaterally stoic facade, the unflinching mask and imperturbable body language he perfected back in his native land. But if she has qualms about her new duties pulling her away from the heaven of Kroger’s immense penthouse library and into mob bars like this one, the pay raise and the bonus of a rare Brockden first edition— In the Beginning Was the Worm: Selected Dream Journals—were compensation enough to buy her acquiescence.

The evening, however, is to have a dual purpose, which August failed to explain on the way over, taking up more than his fair share of the back of the Bamberg, letting his thigh brush up against Wylie’s and slapping driver Raban across the back of the skull when he missed the turnoff to Chin Avenue. Certainly, the night is to be a celebration of Ms. Brown’s first step up the Kroger Family ladder. But while they’re celebrating with the best dim sum in town, why not have a friendly chat with Jimmy Tang himself? Jimmy, the Tong King of the moment, might just be interested in an Asian-backed knockover of Hermann Kinsky. Kinsky, the neighborhood mayor of the Bohemian Wing, is the closest thing Kroger has to a boss, and that humiliating fact alone is motivation enough to risk all the uncertainties involved in throwing an allegiance across ethnic lines.

Which is why August is currently feeling so distracted, trying hard to listen to the object of his most innovative fantasies discuss her doctoral thesis, while at the same time keeping an eye out for the arrival of Jimmy the Tiger and his ever-present flock of meatboys. What’s making concentration even harder is the troupe of drunken Japanese business jocks wrapped around the bar, smashed on sake and the day’s trading at the gray market-place, already engaging in a little push and shove as they vie for the microphone and attempt to will their way past the haze of the booze and the genetics of their native tongue just to croon a verse of “Love Letters in the Sand.”

Kroger watches the bizboys with a mixture of contempt and envy. He knows they’re Tang employees like everyone else in the club, the linked synapses of Jimmy’s personal brain trust. Though they dress and act in rigid imitation of the ziabatsu warriors back home, the particular conglomerate they work for, while perhaps technically no darker than its legal, government-sanctioned cousins, still does business in the shadows and, at the moment anyway, still tends to rely on payroll assassins a bit more than tax attorneys. These are Tang’s money movers, born savvy in the ways of numbers, markets, and the valuation of goods. They spend their days with a telephone implanted in their ear, a cryptic balance sheet just below their fingers. In the course of a weekend they change opium capital into real estate capital, real estate capital into livestock capital, livestock capital into munitions capital, and, very likely, munitions capital back into the milk of the poppy. They could quote the price of yen against the deutsche mark in a coma. They wash Jimmy’s profits in the Caribbean Basin, stockpile them over in the Pacific Rim. And though each, as a servant of the Tang Family, necessarily carries a gun, they leave the blood and guts work to the meatboys and the new generation of street samurai.

Kroger and Wylie are mounted on the last two stools of a bar made from a circular block of lucite filled with one-spot butterfly fish and an occasional specially bred miniature octopus. Wylie wanted a booth, but August needs to keep an eye on all entrances and exits, especially given the fact he’s forced by protocol and common sense to walk softly into the kingdom of Tang, sans weaponry or his two favorite lackeys. But Raban and Blumfeld have other, more pressing duties tonight. And besides, being alone with the librarian, as he still enjoys calling her, is a burden he can learn to love.

“The interesting thing about karaoke,” Wylie is saying, raising her voice just a bit to pull back the boss’s wandering eyes, “is that its popularity in America coincides with the moment the Asian corporations bought up all the rights to the standard playlists. It’s a brilliant maneuver. You create the demand for your back product.”

August picks her hand up off the table and caresses it, trying to stay just this side of fatherly. “Your compulsion to analyze is, forgive me, Ms. Brown, simply adorable.”

Wylie is uncomfortable with both the gesture and the sentiment, but she reminds herself she’s dealing with the product of a foreign culture. So he’s coming on a little too strong tonight, the guy’s got a library that could rival the Library of Congress. With a love of books that pure and strong, he can’t be all bad. And her recent experience with men makes her savor a bit of harmless admiration. So for tonight, anyway, she’s ready to toss back a few drinks and say to hell with being a guardian against objectification.

“Myself,” Kroger says, hesitantly releasing the hand, “I tend to look at things much more simplistically. I am a bottom-line mentality. Go with what works, jettison what does not.”

Wylie raises her drink to him and says, not without humor, “You’re the boss.”

August turns to look toward the restaurant entrance and says quietly, “So I am.”

Fukiyama, the ancient Japanese maître d’, tired of and not understanding the constant inspection, attempts to stare Kroger down and ends up nervously resorting his menus and table diagrams. August turns back to the bar and says, “But this is your night, not mine. You were telling me about Brockden’s demise, I believe.”

To say that Wylie Brown has sacrificed her young life to the memory of a two-hundred-year-old schizophrenic murderer might be overstating the case. To say that the life of Edgar Carwin Brockden has been Wylie’s single, abiding fixation since she first heard about the Minster of Wormland at the age of fourteen might not.

Born in Mettingen, Pennsylvania, in the time of a disgraced president, Wylie relished the kind of idyllic childhood that can lead to a fuzzy bitterness when the balance of one’s existence proves less serene or fulfilling. But when she found herself unable to sleep one night a week after her first, long-delayed menstruation, and uncharacteristically turned on the television set in her parents’ modest ranch house to witness an embarrassingly shabby, Z-budget retelling of the Brockden saga, complete with once-noble Shakespearean lead reduced by alcoholism and serial divorces to perform in creature features and, ultimately, domestic wine commercials, Wylie’s fate was forever altered.

Hollywood may have played fast and loose and cheaply with the tale of the most famous colonial familicide, but neither the bad dialogue nor the cornball farmhouse sets could dull the central intensity of the story for this young and deeply impressionable girl. And when the credits rolled and the television was reduced back to reruns of Boston Blackie, Wylie Brown knew she had found her calling.

She took down her bedroom posters of koala bears and boy singers and replaced them with maps of a New England factory city called Quinsigamond. She put her boxes of jigsaw puzzles in the cellar and had her library card relaminated. And she struggled through all four of the outdated, spine-broken, and historically suspect biographies of E. C. Brockden that were available at that time. The idea of a person being driven mad by his love of language and books was something she needed desperately to understand for reasons that did not become evident until years later.

In the meantime, she pursued this new obsession with a passion that argued against her tender age and made her parents wonder where they had failed and why their daughter had to become the oddball of the neighborhood. For her part, Wylie was already beyond their bourgeois controls. She had embarked on an intellectual and spiritual journey, intent on solving an esoteric mystery that had confounded scholars for generations: what happened to Edgar Garwin Brockden and why did he slaughter his family?

Compulsion eventually brought Wylie to the promised land of Quinsigamond straight out of the Streeter School with a newly minted Ph.D. She’d done her undergrad work at the University of Pennsylvania, where she impressed the grant officers enough to get a full boat to the Streeter. She’d spent the last five years studying the spectrum of the book arts at a variety of institutions around the globe, loving Iowa City and later, Florence, where she conquered all aspects of restoration and preservation, aggravated by Manhattan where she vanquished the complexities of book appraisal, finance, and risk management, and ending up, inevitably, here in Q-town, a Southwick Fellow at the Center for Historical Bibliography. It was a sweet package that any book maven would swoon over: all-access status to the Center’s holdings, housing in the adjoining Southwick Manse, a more than generous living stipend, and the surety that at the end of her research she could just about name her position at any public or private repository on the planet.

But the only place Wylie Brown was interested in going was the City of Words, which she sometimes calls the City of Worms, also known as Brockden Farm, a place where tragedy and madness had once played themselves out in a linguistic nightmare that resonates to this day.

“The obsession with the worms came after he arrived in America,” Wylie explains to her employer. “I’m sure of it. The researchers who point to the Roscommon Journals are reading in. They see what they want to see. You have to be hard-nosed in this area.”

“I can imagine,” Kroger responds, spooning some Crab Rangoon onto his secretary’s plate and wondering what this young woman might look like spread naked on the floor of his library.

“You can’t explain away the fact that this specific breed of worm did not exist in Ireland,” Wylie says, as always getting a little too excited about her topic. “Brockden couldn’t have had contact until the family was established here in the States.”

Trouble flares at the other end of the bar. Word has come down that the city’s finest car thieves are playing a session of Shock the Monkey down on Eldridge Ave and some of the bizboys have whipped out their cell phones and are barking orders to their street bankers, arguing the odds, laying down wagers that could bankrupt a small municipality. Problem is, the phones are wreaking havoc with the karaoke machine and for a couple of these boys, who’ve waited all week for the one moment when they can shut down interest rates and carrying costs and focus solely on the lyrics to “Mack the Knife,” that’s just unacceptable.

But before any Hong Kong silk can be torn, order is restored as Canton Mia, the barkeep, who is known by all to have Tang’s ear and, possibly, some measure of his heart, hammers the ceremonial gong that sits next to her cash register and delivers a quiet, sisterly edict — karaoke will carry the night. The cell phones are slipped back inside jacket pockets and the offending gamblers buy a round of Kamikazes for the whole group.

And everyone’s happy again except for August Kroger. He’s never been good at waiting and when the waiting occurs in the context of a foreign culture, his anxiety is tweaked a notch forward by this discomforting sense of otherness all around him. One would think this would have branded him a disastrous candidate for immigration, but Kroger has found America anything but unfamiliar. In the ways that count, Quinsigamond is the most natural milieu in which August Kroger will ever exist.

“The central mystery to me,” Wylie Brown says, emphasizing the me, and pausing to chug down a generous wallop of Cranberry Morpheme, “isn’t how, exactly, the murders took place, but what was going through Brockden’s mind, what exactly pushed him beyond the brink.”

“Will we ever really know?” Kroger asks, trying for polite and managing only indulgent.

“I don’t mean to be egotistical,” Wylie says, having difficulty spearing a collection of sesame-fried sprouts, “but I swear I’m on the verge. You spend this many years studying another life … I don’t know, you begin to think in the same patterns, your brain starts to move in the same orbit as that of your subject.”

“That,” August says, surprised to find himself intrigued, “sounds dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Wylie says, considering his meaning, suddenly a little dizzy. “You mean because of the murders? Because of what happened to the family in the end?”

Kroger shrugs and leans across the table to wipe yellow sauce off her chin with his napkin.

He says, “What is the saying about looking too deeply into the eyes of a monster?”

It’s a mistake. Wylie reacts as if she’s been personally insulted.

“This is exactly the kind of preconceived prejudice I have to continually fight—”

“Please, Ms. Brown, I meant no—”

“The general public’s ignorance of the man. That willful simplicity about a very complicated and little-known series of events—”

“All I was saying—”

“All those nasty limericks and folk songs.”

Edgar Brockden took a knife

And carved his children and his wife—

“Please, Ms. Brown, Wylie—”

All because God whispered terms

— louding up now, enough volume to steal the attention of the rest of the bar—

Of worship through his friends the worms.

“Is there a problem here?”

And though Kroger looks up hoping to find the maître d’, he knows even before he turns that the question has been asked by the king of Little Asia, Jimmy the Tiger Tang.

August looks from Tang to Wylie and back to Tang, then says, “No problem at all, sir. We were just enjoying the delights of your wonderful establishment.”

“So there is no problem?”

Before Kroger can answer, Wylie, more drunk now than she realizes and staring down at her plate, says, “The crab is a little chewy.”

August Kroger cringes. At this moment, he would like to travel back in time five minutes and crush his beautiful secretary’s windpipe. But Jimmy Tang, five and a half feet of pure class when it comes to even inebriated women, says, “In that case, my profuse apologies. We will do better next time, I assure you.”

Kroger’s shoulders release. He takes a breath, extends a hand toward his host and says, “Allow me to introduce—”

“I know who you are,” Tang says, sliding onto the stool next to Wylie, smiling at her like some high school romantic, “and I know why you are here.”

Kroger is thrown for a loss. Does Jimmy intend to discuss an overthrow right here in public? Granted it’s his domain, but there are ways to do these things and surely, in a manner this delicate, some privacy is in order.

“I want to thank you for taking the meeting, Mr. Tang. I know our relationship will be—”

“Mr. Kroger,” Tang says, an edge placed purposefully in the voice, “you haven’t introduced me to your associate.”

“My associate?” It takes Kroger a second to understand that Jimmy is referring to Wylie Brown. “My associate, yes, of course, Ms. Brown, Miss Wylie Brown, my personal assistant.”

Tang bows his head in Wylie’s direction and she gives a moderate bow back, still sulking over what she sees as the attack on her life’s obsession.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,” Tang says.

“We were enjoying the festivities,” Kroger assures him and motions to a skinny young man with an embarrassing attempt at a goatee, the cigarette in his hand more prop than addiction, putting a wealth of emotion behind “A Big Hunk o’ Love.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Tang says, and he sounds sincere. “Because, you know, I am a creature of ritual. And before I even discuss business, I like to know who I’m spending my time with.”

Kroger is lost but tries to cover.

“A wise habit,” he says. “A prudent way to proceed.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Tang says as Mia takes the microphone away from the singing bizboy in midsentence and brings it to her boss along with a steaming bowl of green tea. Tang takes the microphone and smiles at Wylie, then turns and hands the mike to Kroger, asking, “What would be your favorite song?”

Kroger stares at the Tiger and says, “Excuse me?”

“I’m sure we have it,” Jimmy says. “We’ve got all the oldies. An outstanding selection. All standards.”

“Mr. Tang, I’m not sure—”

“You look like a doo-wop kind of fellow,” Tang says, squinting, trying to size up the Bohemian intruder. “What do you think, fellas?”

The money weasels fall all over themselves trying to agree with their superior.

“But I could be wrong. Are you more Motown? Surf music? We’ve even got a few country-and-western chestnuts. That Mr. Hank Williams, he was a talented man.”

“Mr. Tang,” Kroger fumbles, “I don’t, that is, I’m not a …”

“Is there a problem, Mr. Kroger?” the tone suddenly colder, Tang beginning to let his annoyance show. Kroger has only so much time to allow himself to be embarrassed and belittled.

“Because, as I’m sure you are aware, I’m an exceedingly busy man. And in agreeing to take a meeting with you I not only had to rearrange my schedule. I had to risk offending Hermann Kinsky. So I hope you won’t disappoint me, Mr. Kroger. I hope we can all be friends here. I would very much like to get to know you better”—the head turning for another smile at Wylie—“but when in Little Asia, I would expect you to honor the customs of my land.”

Even in her drunken state, Wylie wonders exactly when karaoke became an honored cultural tradition.

“I mean no disrespect, Mr. Tang,” August says, peripherally noticing a handful of the Tiger’s street muscle file into the bar, their leathers and tattoos silencing the bizboys and turning what was a second ago just a kernel of tension into the full-blown ache of a room about to be filled with consequential violence. “It is simply that I am not familiar with this type of … that is, I simply don’t know any of these songs.”

“I find that hard to believe, August,” use of the first name at this stage not at all a good sign for Kroger. “Everyone knows these songs. They’re universal.”

“I’m not exposed to very much popular entertainment. I don’t get out very much.”

“I’m asking you to try, August. I’m asking you to pick up the microphone and give us a verse or two. That’s all.”

“If I had some time to prepare—”

“What is the goddamn problem here? A child could do this, August,” as the meatboys approach and stand behind Kroger with their arms folded across their chests and their sunglasses covering their eyes. “I just want to hear you sing. Are you telling me this is too much to ask?”

“Perhaps tonight wasn’t a good time—”

“Pick up the microphone and pick a song, August,” Tang yelling now, a few of the bizboys slipping out of the lounge. “Let me hear you, right now.”

There’s a long second of anticipation until Wylie grabs the microphone, saying, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and climbing up until she’s seated on the teak top of the bar. She looks down at Mia and yells, “Give me ‘Klaus, Baby,’ “the Imogene Wedgewood tribute to everyone’s favorite German linguist. Mia punches up the instrumental and the Tiger is at once enthralled. And as the sultry music of piano and bass fills up the Last Man, Wylie Brown spreads herself out, reclines along the length of the bartop, and begins to belt out

Write down your love

and pass me the note

Write down your love

that I’ll own the quote

make it true, make it real

let me know, let me feel

Klaus, Baby,

Write down your love

She works it for all it’s worth, momentarily turning even the gang meat into something close to lovestruck.

By the second verse, she owns the lounge, caressing and manipulating a tune that both August Kroger and Jimmy Tang, from this day forward, will come to think of as our song. But what neither man will ever know is that, as her eyes close and head falls back and the tips of her fingers run provocatively down her neck toward her cleavage, a genuine torch song goddess. Wylie Brown is singing not to her boss and not to the neighborhood mayor of Little Asia, but rather, to a delusional heretic and murderer who’s been dead for over a century.