Читать книгу The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir - Susan Daitch - Страница 17

[Money] only made its way into certain sectors and certain regions, and continued to disturb others. It was a novelty more because of what it brought with it than what it was itself. What did it actually bring? Sharp variations in prices of essential foodstuffs; incomprehensible relationships in which man no longer recognized either himself, his customs, or his ancient values. His work became a commodity, himself a “thing.”

Fernand Braudel

The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979

MONEY WAS RUNNING OUT . THERE was no institution or foundation that would fund work translating a stolen artifact. Necessities had to be balanced: rent, food, electricity, telephone, how long could each remain unpaid? Subway ads that ran headlines like Need Cash? or Is Debt Your Middle Name? beckoned. I wrote 1-800 numbers in the margins of papers but didn’t make the calls.

I began to construct imaginary Suolucidiri relics, made from all kinds of junk salvaged from dump sites near the Gowanus Canal: a god made of bathroom tile (though the Suolocidiris weren’t idol worshippers), a weapon made of orange insulating wire and rusted box-cutter blades, a funerary ornament from soles of Nikes hot-glued to a diamond-shaped piece of sheetrock. More exact might be a simurgh, the phoenix-like bird, made of gaskets, dead batteries stripped of their plastic coating, horns and claws made of dental picks and bent nails. My neighbor Alyssa, the astrologist, who had a habit of knocking on my door from time to time to borrow things, asked if she could photograph this ersatz simurgh. The idea of recycled, reinvented deities made of yogurt containers and electrical wire intrigued her. She didn’t actually ask, but just appeared, camera in hand. I saw no reason to object, sure Alyssa, go right ahead.

There was a story Ruth had told me about a wealthy Mexico City doctor, a Dr. Saenz, who, one afternoon in 1966 received a phone call suggesting that if he flew to the town of Villahermosa in Tabasco, good news lay in store for him. He was interested, and he was fearless, no reservations tugged at his sleeves, no thoughts that anonymous calls directing you here or there might not be in his best interest. He followed the anonymous caller’s instructions to the letter. When he reached Villahermosa, he was met by two men who marched him to a small private plane, and off he flew once again. Although the plane’s navigational equipment was deliberately concealed from him, Dr. Saenz sensed they were flying farther south toward the Guatemala border, and he was correct. Landing on what could only have been a makeshift jungle airstrip, they were met by a group of local men who immediately offered Saenz a series of objects they claimed had been dug up recently. A man holding a rough wooden box was particularly persuasive, and Saenz opened it to discover a codex the man explained he had unearthed in a nearby cave. Most Mayan books, all but three, had been burned by the conquistators, so this was a spectacular find. Saenz snapped it up, but serious questions remained. When had the codex been hidden in the cave? 1532? 1962? The location of the cave was and remained unknown, so the authenticity of the Saenz Codex is still questionable.

You are free to imagine the contents of the last codex, the pages of symbols and drawings, the last evidence, like the last phone book, encyclopedia, catalogue of science, philosophy, religion, and pornography. A whole forbidden world in one book that may or may not be decipherable. Possible secrets: how to heal, cure, travel to other planets, etc. How to do everything that we aren’t.

Once removed from its context in the site, whether a grave or a temple, it’s impossible to know the meaning or use of the stolen object, Ruth had explained, as if I didn’t know. She stole from sites, too, at least once. The thing’s history is then erased, broken off, too much time between death and the present to follow any story, it could have been a doorstop or a cigarette case. Suppose you’re offered a jade mask that you know was probably made to replace the head of a ruler who had lost his own in battles. When his body was discovered, his subjects buried him with jade replacement parts and five or six adolescent boy sacrifices, sealed alive in the tomb, that was the practice, and when dug up hundreds of years later, their skeletons were just by him, along with incised bones, obsidian flake blades, jade beads and stingray spines used for ritual bloodletting, or so you’re told. Without actually traveling to the site and comparing chisel marks, footprints, depressions left in the dirt, you can’t prove these things came from that particular place. Match between site and object can’t be declared beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The object scuttles around the boundaries of its meaning: had it been used in ritual sacrifice or was it a can opener with a face? The mundane and the sacred jumbled together with no way out of the maze of connotation, no way to organize them into hierarchies, and the divine was often tied to the treacherous. I was busy constructing my own personal version of the Saenz Codex. Ruth would be the first one to taunt me, to ridicule the hot-glue gun and imaginary gods. I pushed my artifacts aside.

Sitting at my kitchen table circling jobs I had no qualifications for, finally led to an interview for a position writing voice-over scripts for a series of science programs: this is what happens when you mix thermite with liquid nitrogen, this is how the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, these are the invertebrates that live in a range of underwater volcanoes in a section of the Pacific as big as New York State. I’d been late to the interview at a small company run by a woman whose desk and Steenbeck editing machine were one and the same L-shaped surface overflowing with reels and coffee cups. She, herself, was a flowering plant with jagged petals of rusty blonde hair and black-framed glasses, a perennial producer of projects, perhaps only a fraction of which ever got off the ground. In describing them to me, one sentence, half finished, led to the next, and so on. The principle behind the series was that any naturally occurring phenomenon, could be taken apart and explained in terms of its smallest parts: molecules, atoms, quarks. Protons, photons, futons, electrons, neutrons, wontons. Her partner, who handled the technical side of the company, produced special effects for commercials: the glow on Eveready batteries, the twinkle on Mr. Clean’s earring. He was fed up with television ads and wanted to do something other than enhance or propel animated objects to make them more enticing to prospective consumers. Can you blame him? she asked me, though she didn’t expect an answer. She inquired about my work in eastern Iran. In the words eastern Iran, she confessed, she heard only American hostages. It was an impossible jump cut. I told her the truth. I had been nowhere near the embassy where the hostages had been taken.

But what about meteors and fossil beds, my potential employer asked? Have you written about cloud formations, extreme weather (tidal waves, typhoons, hurricanes), evolutionary theory, the possibility of life on Mars? She played with Boris and Natasha Pez dispensers, explaining that she was trying to quit smoking, and the Pez candy gave her something harmless to suck on.

We need someone whose expertise is varied, she said, but nice to meet you, and we’ll be in touch. It was over in an instant. I shook her hand and left to wait for the elevator in an empty hall paved with the kind of composite stone that looks like black vomit with white chips. If the city, just before it collides with the sun, becomes someone else’s Suolucidir, then these crappy office towers are the nymphaneums, arsenals, temples, and coliseums of the future. Good luck, dude, trying to figure out what went on in these cubicles.

I decided to walk east to grab the F train. The fruit man, a big, bearded Dominican with a square face, long hair in a ponytail, stood on the corner of Houston and Broadway stacking bags of plantains and avocadoes. Paintings of pineapples and bananas still floated on the side of his stall, but there were far more people walking through this intersection than there had been before I’d left the city. A bank had replaced an old man who repaired sewing machines. A hardware store had become what looked like a showroom for shoes that resembled small sculptures you could hold in your hand. I still wasn’t acclimated to large crowds. Then I saw her: Ruth, across the street, laughing, arm and arm with someone, another ponytailed man, though his was short and looked like a shaving brush. I took him to be Saltzman, but it could have been anyone. I didn’t know Ruth was back in the city, but why would I? I started to cross the street to talk to her, then stopped, because I didn’t know what I would say. Ruth, I found the lost city, I was left for dead in a pit, Ruth, call your grandmother? I turned on my heel and ducked into a bar that catered to tourists. It was dark and loud, but the swinging double doors were right there, so I stood at the zinc or zincish counter and ordered a beer. A man in a sweatshirt that read, If there’s no gambling in heaven, I’m not going, pored over a guidebook, and I was about to ask him if he needed directions when I heard a voice calling my name. My first impulse was to be happy to hear the cheery Ash-shor, but this reaction was quickly followed by a different instinct: oh fuck. It was Ruth, smiling as if glad to see me. She had cut off her hair and was wearing big silver Frida Kahlo–like jewelry. Her voice had a new slightly Mexican accent when she said words with r in them. If only I’d chosen another bar, or gone deeper into this one. Larry hung back a few feet away, holding a rolled-up newspaper in one hand while he put change in a telephone near the entrance, and looked up briefly to give me a smile that would only tax his face for a second until he got back to more pressing matters. Phone wedged between ear and shoulder, he had a concerned expression on his face, so I hoped the call would last a good half hour at least.

“I saw you from across the street. Didn’t you hear me? How have you been?”

I ping-ponged the question back to her, though I didn’t really want a response, and knew I’d get one whether I wanted one or not. She and Larry were only in the city for a week, then they would return to Mexico where they were now working, making a film about Augustus Le Plongeon and his photographs of Chichén Itzá. There was no monkey with a monogrammed case, but she was interested in the story about the platform of the Eagles and Jaguars high on the calendar pyramids, the spot Le Plongeon said was the burial place of Chacmool, prince consort to a dethroned Maya queen who had escaped to Egypt. From the Chiapas to Ghiza, they planned to follow a footpath of memes. They had gotten enormous amounts of grant money from Kodak. When she asked me what I was doing I told her I had a job producing films for NASA on interplanetary travel. I was so preoccupied figuring out how to illustrate jumping from Jupiter to Mars, in other words, that I hadn’t heard her call my name.

“I saw you last week on the Q train platform at Union Square, and yelled your name, but you didn’t turn around then either. Your train came, and you disappeared.” While pronouncing this sentence she became annoyed, accusing me of avoiding her, of making our split more of a cataclysm than it needed to be. Insisting that the unpaid delinquent taxes and late fees that still dogged her, all of it was my fault, I’d disappeared into what was it called? Soul Disappear? Sole Sidur? No, Suolucidir. Okay, yeah, where should she send all the letters from the IRS? The gust that began sort of friendly turned into a tornado: your enthusiasm is like a firehose, you don’t take anyone else into account, she shouted over the man in the gambling sweatshirt who was asking the barmaid how to get to Grand Central. He wanted to take a train, not a shuttle, and didn’t seem to understand that the shuttle was a train. Why are you telling me all this now? I shouted. Ruth kept raising her voice. She remembered when she wanted our apartment to be a meat-free zone, and I brought home smoked shoulder of something, some animal, just to spite her, and the apartment was filled with the smell of meat, spicy and salty, the air made you hungry every time you inhaled. The time I left her waiting at the airstrip because in my experience, arriving flights to central Chichén Itzá were always late, and I assumed her plane would be, too. I’d landed a few weeks earlier in order to set up camp, so I knew the odds of an on-time arrival were small. How was I to know that one time the plane would be on time? Ruth was alone, pacing the airstrip in front of a small one-room structure that served as a station, you couldn’t really call it an airport. Even the woman who sometimes sold polenta and chilies wrapped in banana leaves to passengers, even she was gone. Ruth had steam coming out of her ears. It was not an image I wanted to remember. I began to wish Larry would get off the phone already and tell her they needed to leave immediately in order to make a bus to Susquehanna to see a man about a hat company.

“I didn’t take a Q train last week. I never take the Q and less than never from Union Square. It must have been someone who looks like me.”

“No one looks like you.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I figured.” It was familiar joking banter, and though she smiled almost sweetly, full typhoon averted, when she spoke, I glanced casually at my watch, calculated that if I didn’t leave soon the conversation would spiral and include the new boyfriend, so I left Ruth with my half-finished beer, tipped my hat at Larry, still on the pay phone as I passed him on my way out.

When I got to my building the astrologer was leaving her apartment, taking out a stack of old newspapers, archival evidence of her columns giving love and money advice for a future that will never happen.

“Are you having work done in your apartment?’

I shook my head.

“Someone was making a racket up there.”

“When?” I shouted at her as I leaped up the stairs two at a time, looking down at her hair dyed in olive and grape-colored feathers. She shrugged.

The door was ajar. I only had to look in at the stuff thrown all over the place in my apartment to know the refrigerator door would also be open, swinging in the breeze, orange juice concentrate melting and pooling into a small lake. The scroll and the simurgh were gone, as was Sidonie Nieumacher’s notebook, and Rostami had left no forwarding address.

“Ariel? Thank God it’s you. I’m still looking for Ruthie, and now I’m getting very worried. Did you see the paper this morning?”

“No, Ada, no, I haven’t read anything yet.”

“There’s an obituary for Ariel Bokser, a thirty-six-year-old man who lives in Brooklyn, left an ex-wife and a stepmother behind, but no other relatives. “

“It must be someone else because you’re talking to me.”

“Well, I don’t think so. It sounds just like you. How’s your stepmother?”

“I don’t know I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

“A strange woman. She argues with everyone, and she can’t stop talking. It’s like there’s a button on her butt, and when she sits down you can’t shut her up. I don’t know what your father saw in her. You can’t trust Tchoimans.”

Ada, who often appeared to be easily steamrollered, but in fact was no pushover, said this about a lot of people. The truth was I didn’t know my stepmother very well and needed to get the paper to see if I’d died overnight, but Ada diverted from the subject of my demise, carried on about my stepmother, a woman she’d only met at my wedding — an event she otherwise claimed to have no knowledge of.

“If she told me once, she told me a hundred times that Bokser means carob, a tree that doesn’t bear fruit for seventy years, so you plant knowing that even though it will offer you nothing, the tree will benefit someone in the future. Like by telling this story she proved that she, a Bokser by second marriage, was providing for her grandchildren while the rest of us were deadbeats. What she was really doing was stealing from you and Ruthie.”

“Ada, are you at home?”

“I’m not going anywhere.” She sighed, remembering our conversations were often short. “Call me if you hear from Ruthie.”

I borrowed a paper from my neighbor’s doorstep and quickly turned to the obituaries. It was true. Ariel Bokser had died, no memorial service, no dearly missed stepson, etc. Just a short notice:

Deceased: Ariel Bokser, Aged 32. Born May 19, 1950 Brooklyn, New York. Died suddenly of unknown causes, March 18. Graduated from the University of Chicago. Did field work in Iran. Survived by former wife, Ruth Koppek Bokser of Mexico City and stepmother, Miriam Raub Bokser. Contributions can be sent to the Zafar Institute.

I didn’t know whose body was found in the Gowanus Canal. It couldn’t have been Rostami, because Ruth had seen him (mistaking him for me) waiting for a Q train at Union Square. Assuming Rostami wanted to shed Bokser, but didn’t want to kill me, perhaps he’d found some anonymous shmuck on whom to plant my passport, fake tax returns, whatever, and put an end to him, so Rostami could become Jahanshah again. Well, it’s a theory. Now I, too, was going to have trouble being Ariel Bokser. I could no longer apply to the Zafar Institute in order to return to Suolucidir, for one thing. I was floating, like a man walking on a wire between tall buildings, or only navigating the possibility of a short drop between sawhorses weighted down by sandbags, not sure whether the risks of reinventing myself were life-shattering or more inconsequential than one might think.