Читать книгу ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART - David Dorian - Страница 18

Two Time Zones

I showered and got dressed. I walked back to the bedroom to retrieve my watch on the night table. It ran thirty-six minutes ahead. It marked an unlived future. This Swiss watch didn’t depend on a battery. It picked up the vibrations of the hand movements which oscillates a tuning fork. It had been, till now, an accurate chronometer offered for my fortieth birthday by my wife. I pressed it to my ear. Mechanical arrhythmia was the diagnosis. It was still measuring time, but not the time I was living in. I stored it in my pocket, promising to visit a watchmaker. This Swiss watch had been crafted with aplomb by artisans who had taken precision to a standard of the highest order. Was this time monitor responding to a schism in my time continuum? Was its delicate and sensitive mechanism, the indented wheels and gears designed and cut by artful craftsmen, compromised? Had the pinions and sprockets been affected by my emotional crisis precipitated by my existence in two chronological time zones?

Our heart is a time machine, like a chronometer in music. It measures the passage of that dimension and establishes a cadence. We are all allotted a certain number of beats. And then the mechanism ceases. We call it cardiac arrest. The watch was strapped to my wrist and was picking up heartbeats and the rhythm of blood gushing through my arteries. The pulse of a subject is taken by pressing that articulation point of the metacarpus. My watch sensed my pulse on a continuous basis. It oscillated the tuning fork. Was it now reacting to my asymmetrical heartbeat? Was the beat of my watch altered by an intermittent heart?

*****

Alvard had invited me to Delilah’s, a soul food restaurant bar on First Avenue. I ordered a bourbon, and he asked for Perrier.

“She’s gifted, your masseuse,” I voiced.

“In the twelfth century she’d burn at the stake,” he said.

“You think she’s a witch?” I intoned.

“Who cares?”

“I’ve been reading about massage. They talk of a spiritual transcendence achieved by some patients during massage sessions. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I felt after she finished with me. How did you find her?” I asked.

“I was doing a gig at Jezebel’s in Harlem. I was buddy with the owner Hadrian Vergilius, a guy from Martinique. He had a side business. He’d deliver girls to chic pubs and bars uptown. Pimp extraordinaire. I became the physician for all the girls. Maintained hygiene, you know. Hadrian’s drinking was getting worse. He tried AA. The booze was killing him. One night I drove him to an AA meeting, and there she was. He met her there. She was networking for her business. Plenty of potential customers there. He scheduled an appointment. After three massage sessions, he couldn’t touch alcohol.”

AA is a circle of Dante’s hell, a sanctuary for the damned, a holding cell. Lost souls congregated in those rooms seeking rescue and salvation, Alvard explained. Her beauty was a lure for down-and-out men whose egos were diminished by their debilitating addictions. They thought they could munch on her Asian pussy. They all became her patients. She haunted that subterranean underworld inhabited by sinners, offering glimmers of hope to helpless souls. The resurrection she peddled was accessible. She would touch their ailing skin, caress their neglected epidermis. And they wouldn’t drink anymore.

“And she doesn’t even speak English,” Alvard said.

He sipped his Perrier.

“She talks with her hands. She’s a Walkyrie,” he said.

“What’re you talking about?”

“A Walkyrie, a Chooser of the Dead. She picks wounded warriors in the battlefield and flies them to Valhalla,” he said.

“He’s still her client?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Hadrian.”

“Died in a car crash.”

“What happened?”

“Hadrian bought a beach bungalow in Ogunquit, Maine. A foreclosure deal. Very cheap. We’d hang out there, in the summer, and eat lobsters 24-7. The police report said it was highway fatigue. He’d been driving for eleven hours. He was sober when he had the accident.”