Читать книгу The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir - Susan Daitch - Страница 16

“Why don’t you get out and walk?” Southern Gentleman Gambler “You can’t put me off a public conveyance!” Gatewood, banker

Stagecoach

John Ford, 1939

THE PHONE RANG AGAIN.

“Hello. Ariel Bokser?”

“Yes.”

“This is Ariel.”

“Who?”

“It took me a while to find you, but I’m at the corner of Neptune and Coney Island Avenue, at Mezzenotte Pizza. This is near you, no? I’m waiting. Come as soon as you can. We shouldn’t be seen together, but we need to meet.”

I recognized the voice and unmistakable accent before I had a chance to speak. The intersection of Neptune and Coney Island isn’t near where I live, but I rushed out the door to the subway. A train was just leaving as I ran down the stairs to the platform. The platform, the subwayness of the subway made it difficult to retrieve images of the city almost halfway around the world. Every detail of my present city bombarded.

While I waited, leaning against a blue column, I noticed someone had made an origami swan out of a white gum wrapper. The tiny bird was stuck to the column with bits of gum, so it looked like it had stopped mid-downward-swoop. It occurred to me that I spent a lot of my life underground, and I was reminded of a song on a science record I had when I was a child. The earth is like a great big grapefruit. Twenty-five thousand miles around. You could dig from here to China, if you could dig through the ground. The lyrics were followed by tinkling music that was meant to sound Chinese, then the voice resumed by saying in a minatory tone: But you can’t.

Ten minutes later the next train arrived, crowded because of the delay. A deaf mute entered the car honking a series of horns in a rendition of Oh What a Beautiful Morning! He moved his head back and forth in time, and he lurched when the train swerved. He must have suffered a stroke at some point in the past, because half of his face had fallen. “Yo, Harpo, c’mere,” a man standing next to me shouted in futility as the deaf mute approached our part of the car, then we staggered toward him to put some coins in the paper cup, our change falling to the floor, quarters, nickels swallowed up, disappearing. It’s rare to see subway performers this far out on the line, but then the deaf mute got off at the next stop, crossed over to the opposite platform, honking out his songs up the stairs in order to reverse his trip.

The train stalled between Kings Highway and Avenue U, but forty minutes later I was at Mezzanotte Pizza. The walls were covered with drawings of local people and celebrities who ate there: Tony Bennett, Abe Beam, Barbara Stanwyck, if you could believe it. Teenagers sat conspiratorially in one booth, an old man sat in another, but that was about it. No Rostami. I ordered a slice at the counter and asked if anyone fitting his description had come into the restaurant in the past hour.

“A guy who looks kind of like you?” the fellow at the cash register asked. He drew with a pencil whose silver finial was chewed down to a molar-shaped nugget.

I nodded.

“Yes, he was here for a while, then he left.” He held up his sketch. On the back of a receipt he had drawn a picture of Javanshah Rostami. He was here.

I expected to hear from Jahanshah Bokser again, but in the days that followed not even Ada Koppek had any interest in talking to me. Rostami wasn’t listed in the phone book under my name, his own, or some hybrid combination of the two, unless he’d devised an unknown anagram. The shells of Bokserness can easily be shrugged off like a snake’s old skin, passport tossed out, lying in a landfill upriver. There are always those pieces of home under your fingernails that you don’t want to clean, and leave as they are for as long as possible. Or you gather around you all the rags of your past life that you can muster until they become a kind of shelter. Rostami had left his children, his family, a longing greater than any I could imagine. Followed by now unemployed Savak agents, I imagined him as me reunited with Ruthie, teaching at a university with office hours and assistants to look up details about the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 that divvied up Persia.

Sometimes I sensed a man or woman was following me, but it may only be that I was anticipating Jahanshah to overtake me, tap me on the shoulder. Once in midtown a woman in a leather jacket with very wide lapels and sharp-toed boots seemed to be only a few yards behind me. Every time I turned around, there she was. This went on for blocks. I watched out of the corner of my eye as if I were a garment district tourist looking in windows as I slowly made my way across 36th Street, taking in windows full of mannequin parts, felt hats, feathers and buttons, small plastic toys from Japan. There was a Pronto Photo at one corner that guaranteed one-hour processing time. A dusty cardboard blow-up of Cybill Shepherd on a bicycle occupied most of the shop’s small plate glass window. She turned and held an instamatic camera, her expression hopeful, the edges of her blonde head frayed; she was larger than life. A man in a stained shirt and thick glasses entered the window to remove a projector from the display. He put his hand in Cybill Shepherd’s crotch in order move her to the left. He saw me watching and winked as he wiggled his fingers in the cardboard shorts, but I wasn’t watching him; I wanted to see if the leather woman was still following me. I turned around slowly, and there she was, but when I waved at her like a bobble-head with hands, she disappeared into an office building.

One night coming home late I was mugged, but it was a random mugging, the kind of thing that happens at two in the morning in the entrance to my building. The mugger was incoherent, but he had a knife, and took my wallet. He didn’t threaten more than that, or force his way upstairs to ransack my apartment, looking for a Suolucidiri relic that provided an uncanny model for the construction and contestation of competing notions of the truth and crime.

Wearing surgical gloves I continued to unroll the scroll, but the Q and L story was left unfinished. What remained were just clumps of letters that didn’t seem to form words anymore, at least not any I could find a translation for. Unless the remainder was written in another language, though the alphabet was the same, the writing no longer made any syntactical sense. I held the cylindrical case up to my eye as if it were a pirate’s spyglass, then tossed it on the table. My neighbor’s cat, who came in via the fire escape, played with the cylinder, found interesting smells in the decades-old leather. She sniffed it from end to end, batted it off the table, reached a long paw into the case, but it rolled under the couch. She was desperate for this new toy, so I moved the couch to retrieve it. Under the couch were dust bunnies the size of Mars, loose change, chewed pencils, subway tokens.