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The Last Allusionist |
I have dreamed wildly, for as long as I can remember, of a life lived tolerably; of a death spectacular. Do not mistake me—the contemplation of this dynamic end is not the product of a morbid malady or a reclusive melancholia. It is not that I wish to be rid of the world. If anything, it is a rather mundane material wondering, a curiosity almost perfunctory for a member of the exalted Allusionist line (exalted by whom, I cannot quite say, as I have since learned that our fame was somewhat limited in geographical scope). I was taught, nevertheless, to pay venerable heed to my forbears.
Paintings of these stolid progenitors held their council in a row of portraits hung behind me at the tavern where I tended bar. From there, they took nightly account of my doings. My great-great grandmother's pale countenance peered at me from within a black exterior, her features daubed boldly in crude squares of paint, her eyes indistinct grey rafts afloat within the general pallor of her face. My grandfather had executed a brief reprieve from his Allusionist duties to serve in the military, but, finding his skills of no use on the battlefield (literature did not hold the currency amongst his fellow soldiers that it did amongst the patrons of his bar), he deserted to the bosom that had borne him. Upon his return, he convinced my father to take a club to his left kneecap, which rendered my grandfather legally relieved of all militaristic duties. The fallow aggression that might have made my grandfather a chief commander on the front lines seemed to have been instead subsumed by the painter of his portrait, no doubt the daily target of a simmering discontent (my grandfather was known to have his moments of satisfied pensivity, but for the most part he considered his life an unsuccess and grew into his role as the veritable curmudgeonly proprietor of this, our local tavern). His likeness, therefore, was marked by exhaustive depiction. He was immortalized in this painting with the fancy cane he had had fashioned for his lameness; with this prop, he maintained his dignity. And my mother, after whom the mantle passed to me, was painted leaning casually against the beige stones of what looked like a castle behind her, but which I knew to be the tool shed which had once served as an outhouse.
But I digress—what I had meant to convey is that each of these ancestors looks upon me immortalized, with the satisfaction of a death well-received, each in the most extraordinary and unbelievable circumstances. My great-grandmother was drowned in the marsh that once girdled the tavern, when a wooden plank connecting the street to this, our shining beacon in the night, collapsed inexplicably beneath her very average weight. She left the tavern one night in great spirits—so to speak—and a commotion went up the following morning that this proprietor was found in a marsh that was, also inexplicably, suddenly dried up. The wooden plank, now superfluous, was removed, as was the body of my beloved grandmother.
My grandfather, forever obsessed with sleeping upon the roof of the tavern, and whose dream it was to catch a star (for he believed that it must be that from time to time a star fell from the sky and could be trapped like a firefly in a jar), persisted in this assumption and was found immobile and frozen, with an open jar and singed hands, by which evidence we attributed his mission a success—for he would not have opened the jar had he not been on the cusp of capturing this firefly that had come loose from the firmament. My mother says that she retrieved the jar with her own hands and indeed the star lived when she collected it, though by the time she had brought it into the tavern to show my father, it had already sputtered out of existence. We burned the ashen pebble with my grandfather’s cremated remains and scattered them upon that roof, with a cane secured vertically at the spot the star had fallen to mark his memory.
As for my mother, she had a particular affinity for communicating with animals. In a quiet and unusual death, she engaged in a rather involved discourse with the spotted mare brought by my uncle from the mountains, and they (she and the unusually rhetorical equine) enjoyed an ardent battle of wits before she was overcome by a final solipsistic rambling put forth by that neighing majesty, an argument so rapturously absurd that she collapsed on the spot. The swish of the horse’s tail echoed the wind that passed over the fields at that precise instant (by this time, the marsh had become a thing of the past and the fertile soil had begotten a host of golden cattails, and it was among these that my mother was buried, joined in a neighboring grave ten years hence by the mare that had been her undoing).
So you see, I had quite the mantle to live up to. Ever since I was a boy, I contemplated how it would happen for me—what would be my story? Perhaps I would drown in the multitudinous seas incarnadine, or a behemoth from the deserts would rise and come for me—or, perhaps, as sometimes happens, death would come to me by my own sword (but, as I did not own a sword, this last possibility was logistically unlikely).
I concocted the most glorious methods of my own demise, but each day continued to pass just as the ones before it, and my life persisted. If you think I had been bored, pity me not—the quality of patience was indeed innate to the fabric of my being; if this expositional part of my life would be, then I would let it be. To be quite frank, I was kept contentedly busy once I had reached my mid-twenties (a suitable time to knock off) by the daily anticipation of an artful demise and the honest toil by which I had built up a retinue of regular customers. The tavern, over the passage of years and the natural migration of populations towards the more ostentatious centers of human haberdashery, had grown more and more remote from the common thoroughfares and visitors became rarer and rarer. As an Allusionist establishment, we offered a particular type of spirits which I have not known any other than my line to have offered in all of history or afterwards; it is only appropriate that a line of people so literary in life would be so literary in death.
Now to that fateful night, the story which it is my object to relate to you now that all this drudgery of my history has been sufficiently tendered.
“Two shots of Kafka, and—you know, cut it with some Poe for a bit of that umber taint.”
I nodded. He dropped a collection of his coins on the table in a most haphazard manner so that they rolled outwards. I felt I could hear the thunder of each one separately hitting the table (at the price of my equilibrium). I turned to the rows of bookshelves behind me and tore two pages from the center of Kafka’s “The Trial” and placed them in the TYPEWRITER. I inserted the pages neatly between the two rollers and cranked the handle in circles with my right hand as I called back to the lad, “I’d recommend Proust instead of Poe—a heavier, more bodily darkness to balance the citrus twang of Kafka.” As I cranked, the ink was leaked from the page through a metal tube into two cups, which I swirled with ease. I crumpled the pages, now empty, and threw them into the trash. The drink looked a royal purple.
“You’re the expert,” the boy replied.
Pleased, I tore two pages from “Swann’s Way”—the bit about the madeleines, which I had been saving for a special occasion but now decided to use to heighten this banal one. This occasioned a solid green liquid which mixed with the shots of Kafka to form a deep grey-brown, from a distance—in fact, the colors did not mix perfectly and so, up close, the shot struck me as suddenly most beautiful. The green streaks veined the purple drink. I handed the shots to the grateful youth and looked out at the tavern, feeling oddly satisfied. Even as the shouts of the group, with most predictably prescribed event of the lad returning with the shots for which he had been sent forth, erupted, I remained unnerved.
I looked out upon the cast of patrons whom I had attracted, night after night, to this hallowed establishment. A farmer who owned a plot nearby and, as he left his farm unattended when he came here, always traveled with a band of goats tied one to each other in a clump with twine and herded by a determined dog of the shepherding breed. An orchestral bleat alerted us nightly to his arrival. His drink of choice was David Copperfield by Dickens: a nice, round drink. Then there was a mother and son, newly reunited. Part of the estrangement had been due to love of drink, and so the mother drank mock tinctures strictly composed from pages of the dictionary (having no narrative arc, these arbitrary lists of words, though flavorful, did not result in the sort of intense experientiation of composed masterpieces that took heed of Aristotle’s principles of good literature). For the boy, just of age, she would always get something different—Beckett, Joyce, or Mann. A newspaper reporter sipped Swift for hours on end, taking respite in a bar where nothing remarkable that required his reportage ever seemed to transpire. A lute player inhabited the far corner and drank the rhythms of Baudelaire which relieved themselves in the gentle manipulation of his strings; he played his dirges all through the night. There was a time when a poet used to frequent the place, but she became so overcome by the paranoia that, in her intexticated state, she would be so inebriated in the classics that she might succumb to inadvertent plagiarism that would be unrecognizeable to her as imitation in the morning.
This was the tableau of patrons that was assembled on the evening the stranger stepped in. Before she did, as though to announce her presence—though it may also have been a carriage laden with supplies misshapenly passing over the moors, we saw the shadow of an animal pass over the window—as though a whale, swallowing us all like Jonas, making us think that what if we are not all living what we think to be our lives in the digestive rigors of a whale’s belly—our trials, its ribs, our joys sending a stream of water gusting forth like a flare into the slay signaling to the vast ocean that something of import has come to pass.
When she walked in, and I took one look at her, I had a premonition that this woman would be my undoing—or my doing, as it were. With her entered a hound of the most unremarkable light brown color (as though it hated to commit to a hue). Its fur glowed unnaturally blue in the dim candlelight. It looked up at me with tired, red eyes—as though it took great effort for it to angle its gaze, and it seemed to cradle a superfluous monocle in one of its sockets. Its ears hung in flaps on either side and grazed the floor in two lazy trails as it walked. I looked at this mild beast and thought, you, you will deliver me to my tragic end. (I later learned that this bespectacled canine went by the name Miss Eleanor and had, for all intents and purposes, no interest in my murder). The woman calmly seated herself at the bar and awaited my attendance.
The terror! I had dreamed of it for so long and now I would be delivered into death’s tangled grasp—what I would miss most, it suddenly occurred to me, was trying to decipher the mystery of it all; I had grown quite accustomed to my curiosity and was not sure what would animate my thoughts afterwards, if thoughts I would have and if they be animated. The fear rattled my fingertips, so much so that I spilled some dregs of Aphra Behn. I was feeding pages of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks into the machine; the kamikaze drops looked like mottled specks on the triangular tiles of the floor, between the two shiny black tips of my shoes; this was the sort of still, quiet image one should hold, I thought, to be focused on and reflected upon during the impending drama—the candlelight upon my shoes and the steady drip, drop, drip, drop of Buddenbrooks provided the barely perceptible drumbeat of my unfolding climax.
In spite of myself, I caught her eyes for a moment. Her eyes were fringed by a thicket of lashes that seemed beyond what must have been necessary; her face had a sepulchral depth and this moribund countenance did not render her any less deeply beautiful. She had long fingers with which she gripped things with a calculated certainty, giving a sense not only of grasping but of coiling impenetrably her object. A movie played out within her irises; she was, in a way, imagination personified; what she conceived of, one might see by looking into her eyes. One might find this frightening enough, but all the more frightening was when these moving pictures grew dim and her irises reverted to black, a curtain drawn upon her thoughts.
My moment had come, and I so young! I thought, in spite of myself. Perhaps she sensed my ecstasy, but she merely sat patiently and stared ahead. I did not tend to her immediately—I sought to inhabit the moment to its fullest tenor (and speaking of harmonies, the lute player had abandoned the melancholic notes of his pet instrument and was now banging minor chords into the harpsichord). I don’t know why, but I became intent on impressing this strange woman. It was important that she think my death a worthy mission, that she understand the pathos of me in my banal element.
So I wandered my tavern as though I had not a care in the world, guffawing at the farmer’s jokes, nodding seriously at the exchange of wits by the mother and son, leisurely dusting and polishing my finest full volume set of works by Virginia Woolf. I dusted and polished with such fastidiousness of focus that it must have appeared to be the most painstaking concern of my life. I bore such an inflated sense of my own importance to her mission that I fancied often that she must have been following my movements with her eyes, but each time I turned and looked to the bar, I found her eyes fixed resolutely forward, patiently unperturbed by my dilatory meanderings.
Finally, when I could stand the curiosity no longer, I approached her from my station behind the bar. “Hello, Ma’am. You’re just passing through these parts?”
As I peppered the scene with trivialities, I glanced around the room, assessing the patrons now in a new light. Would any of them prove to mitigate my glory? Fancy I had not thought of it before—I might have amassed a more intentional group of clientele to witness my Grand Exit. At least there would be someone to immortalize the evening in print, I thought, glancing at the newspaper reporter (though, to be honest, the absent poet may have been more to my liking—more gleaming, befitting the ardor of the situation). Nevertheless, I supposed a mere rendition of the facts would do just as well, if those facts themselves be fantastic. I took a furtive survey of my surroundings, making sure there was no potential for a hapless individual to play the hero, to “rescue” me from my glorious fate in a hedonistic conflagration of attention; for once the hero arrives upon the scene, my role as victim would be thrust into the background, my presence and my fame would become protagonistically redundant.
“What can I get for you?” My tone was measured, expert.
“I am not here for a drink, sir. I have come for the land upon which we stand.”
“My family has owned this land for at least a hundred years,” I announced to her, my palms wet with the sheen of anticipation at this promising conflict of interest.
“Yes, but before that there lived upon it a single man in a single house.”
“You have come to retrieve the remains of the house?”
“I have come for the bones of the man.”
And then she proceeded to relate her story. She had travelled (with Miss Eleanor) hundreds of miles in search of this land. How could she be sure the house had stood in this very spot? She knew it to be so—the hound, less imposing without her monocle, concurred. “I have been sent as an envoy from my people,” the strange woman said. I saw in her irises their vast farmlands, overcome by hordes of boll weevils carving out circles within circles whose paths, viewed in their right way, appeared to be the outlines of roses. She told me that a pestilence had overocme their crop; the cows had begun to fall dead of no provocation at all; some unholy spirit wracked the house which, after some particularities of the hauntings, they had deduced to be the uneasy apparition of this avuncular ancestor, who had been turned out for some unpardonable offense in the twilight of his lifetime and had made some pronouncement under the sun as he backed away from them, that he would build his own house of which he would not be only king but also courtier, not only groundskeeper but also garden. His torso—for he would not let them see his fading back—grew smaller and smaller as he backed away into the distance, a small almost comical featureless silhouette in the spotlight of a red-orange sun balanced on the horizon. So he built a sprawling house with a porch and a weather vane. One day, the house, desiring to be a person, had taken it upon itself to walk the world in the guise of the old man. The old man, evicted from his body by this Frankensteinian edifice, watched his neglected panels fall into disrepair. Perhaps, the old man did not appreciate how the profligate house was whiling away its life, and so on a short return from one of his sojourns, the old man—in the form of the house—orchestrated a grand collapse upon his own house, in the form of his body. It was a tidy affair altogether, as neither man nor house was heard from again.
“I have come to free his spirit and thereby lift the pestilence that terrorizes our farm.”
I had to tell her—this could not be! My death must occur upon the ground of the tavern; I must be buried beneath it or above it or around it, and remain thus in perpetuity, my grave visage hanging over the counter for future generations. This was the glory for which I had been groomed; the death for which I had been bred! “With all due respect, this tavern is my birthright and I am not prepared to give it up duly, without a proper duel,” I answered.
The stranger reached into her cloak; I thought, perhaps, for a dagger, but instead she produced two shot glasses. “I challenge you to a Duel of the Literati,” she said.
The game took place as such: We sat across from each other at a small round table on the floor of the tavern. To the haphazard rising tune of the harpsichord, the news reporter flitting about us in circles in his hawkish way, seeming to be everywhere at once, the mother and son finding it increasingly difficult to continue their discourse in the face of this growing cynosure were drawn into the circle. And so we had our audience; I would like to think that they were rooting for me to keep the land out of a sense of loyalty and that their breath caught in the moment between every reveal.
My oldest regular took upon the role of master of the game. He liquified pages upon pages, shot after shot, banging two at a time on the table. I and the stranger took a swig and identified the piece of literature. I would look away, gaze at the ornate patterns on the tin ceiling, pretend to play with a piece of dirt on the tile with the black tip of my boot—thinking—hoping!—that perhaps she might poison my drink. But still we persisted, shot after shot, neck and neck. I felt as though I had trained for this duel all my life; my entire being seemed to participate in it: Middlemarch, The Rape of the Lock, Heart of Darkness! I found myself screaming the names increasingly as the game went on; the stranger retained her composure and did no such thing, calmly stating her identifications with the infinite grace that was her wont. I must have stood up at some point, found myself jumping from foot to foot like a primate. I was dizzy with the hysteria. I was dizzy also, I think, with the realization that this tragedy was not in store for me upon this night, and that I might continue to live and that, if I fell victim to a single error, I might lose the land beneath the tavern that was my birthright—that it would be for this that I would be remembered—a Paradise Lost worthy of its Miltonian posturing.
Then, in a flash, it came to me. I knew what to do. I took my seat calmly; I looked into her irises—I saw in them a mirror of myself sitting at this chair taking this shot, almost as though I had willed it. YES, I thought, I would watch my own end in her eyes, and it would be glorious! I had decided: I would let her win. I would lose, and in doing so, I would fling myself into the most spectacular death of all: OBSCURITY. My progeny would walk the earth for the rest of time, their allusionistic legacy completely unknown to them—like phantoms, they would feel the tug of their destiny, but they would never know to what they were called. They would not know to transform liquor into literature.
I now live on a small side street in Sussex, England, where I am assistant to a seller of rivets. My past is known to no one in town. I will live out my days and nights here and die a quiet death. I will always remember that once I was in possession of a class of liquors most unusual, and you will remember that I am the one known as the last of the Allusionists.
To die is simpler than anyone supposes, and subtler.
Paintings of these stolid progenitors held their council in a row of portraits hung behind me at the tavern where I tended bar. From there, they took nightly account of my doings. My great-great grandmother's pale countenance peered at me from within a black exterior, her features daubed boldly in crude squares of paint, her eyes indistinct grey rafts afloat within the general pallor of her face. My grandfather had executed a brief reprieve from his Allusionist duties to serve in the military, but, finding his skills of no use on the battlefield (literature did not hold the currency amongst his fellow soldiers that it did amongst the patrons of his bar), he deserted to the bosom that had borne him. Upon his return, he convinced my father to take a club to his left kneecap, which rendered my grandfather legally relieved of all militaristic duties. The fallow aggression that might have made my grandfather a chief commander on the front lines seemed to have been instead subsumed by the painter of his portrait, no doubt the daily target of a simmering discontent (my grandfather was known to have his moments of satisfied pensivity, but for the most part he considered his life an unsuccess and grew into his role as the veritable curmudgeonly proprietor of this, our local tavern). His likeness, therefore, was marked by exhaustive depiction. He was immortalized in this painting with the fancy cane he had had fashioned for his lameness; with this prop, he maintained his dignity. And my mother, after whom the mantle passed to me, was painted leaning casually against the beige stones of what looked like a castle behind her, but which I knew to be the tool shed which had once served as an outhouse.
But I digress—what I had meant to convey is that each of these ancestors looks upon me immortalized, with the satisfaction of a death well-received, each in the most extraordinary and unbelievable circumstances. My great-grandmother was drowned in the marsh that once girdled the tavern, when a wooden plank connecting the street to this, our shining beacon in the night, collapsed inexplicably beneath her very average weight. She left the tavern one night in great spirits—so to speak—and a commotion went up the following morning that this proprietor was found in a marsh that was, also inexplicably, suddenly dried up. The wooden plank, now superfluous, was removed, as was the body of my beloved grandmother.
My grandfather, forever obsessed with sleeping upon the roof of the tavern, and whose dream it was to catch a star (for he believed that it must be that from time to time a star fell from the sky and could be trapped like a firefly in a jar), persisted in this assumption and was found immobile and frozen, with an open jar and singed hands, by which evidence we attributed his mission a success—for he would not have opened the jar had he not been on the cusp of capturing this firefly that had come loose from the firmament. My mother says that she retrieved the jar with her own hands and indeed the star lived when she collected it, though by the time she had brought it into the tavern to show my father, it had already sputtered out of existence. We burned the ashen pebble with my grandfather’s cremated remains and scattered them upon that roof, with a cane secured vertically at the spot the star had fallen to mark his memory.
As for my mother, she had a particular affinity for communicating with animals. In a quiet and unusual death, she engaged in a rather involved discourse with the spotted mare brought by my uncle from the mountains, and they (she and the unusually rhetorical equine) enjoyed an ardent battle of wits before she was overcome by a final solipsistic rambling put forth by that neighing majesty, an argument so rapturously absurd that she collapsed on the spot. The swish of the horse’s tail echoed the wind that passed over the fields at that precise instant (by this time, the marsh had become a thing of the past and the fertile soil had begotten a host of golden cattails, and it was among these that my mother was buried, joined in a neighboring grave ten years hence by the mare that had been her undoing).
So you see, I had quite the mantle to live up to. Ever since I was a boy, I contemplated how it would happen for me—what would be my story? Perhaps I would drown in the multitudinous seas incarnadine, or a behemoth from the deserts would rise and come for me—or, perhaps, as sometimes happens, death would come to me by my own sword (but, as I did not own a sword, this last possibility was logistically unlikely).
I concocted the most glorious methods of my own demise, but each day continued to pass just as the ones before it, and my life persisted. If you think I had been bored, pity me not—the quality of patience was indeed innate to the fabric of my being; if this expositional part of my life would be, then I would let it be. To be quite frank, I was kept contentedly busy once I had reached my mid-twenties (a suitable time to knock off) by the daily anticipation of an artful demise and the honest toil by which I had built up a retinue of regular customers. The tavern, over the passage of years and the natural migration of populations towards the more ostentatious centers of human haberdashery, had grown more and more remote from the common thoroughfares and visitors became rarer and rarer. As an Allusionist establishment, we offered a particular type of spirits which I have not known any other than my line to have offered in all of history or afterwards; it is only appropriate that a line of people so literary in life would be so literary in death.
Now to that fateful night, the story which it is my object to relate to you now that all this drudgery of my history has been sufficiently tendered.
“Two shots of Kafka, and—you know, cut it with some Poe for a bit of that umber taint.”
I nodded. He dropped a collection of his coins on the table in a most haphazard manner so that they rolled outwards. I felt I could hear the thunder of each one separately hitting the table (at the price of my equilibrium). I turned to the rows of bookshelves behind me and tore two pages from the center of Kafka’s “The Trial” and placed them in the TYPEWRITER. I inserted the pages neatly between the two rollers and cranked the handle in circles with my right hand as I called back to the lad, “I’d recommend Proust instead of Poe—a heavier, more bodily darkness to balance the citrus twang of Kafka.” As I cranked, the ink was leaked from the page through a metal tube into two cups, which I swirled with ease. I crumpled the pages, now empty, and threw them into the trash. The drink looked a royal purple.
“You’re the expert,” the boy replied.
Pleased, I tore two pages from “Swann’s Way”—the bit about the madeleines, which I had been saving for a special occasion but now decided to use to heighten this banal one. This occasioned a solid green liquid which mixed with the shots of Kafka to form a deep grey-brown, from a distance—in fact, the colors did not mix perfectly and so, up close, the shot struck me as suddenly most beautiful. The green streaks veined the purple drink. I handed the shots to the grateful youth and looked out at the tavern, feeling oddly satisfied. Even as the shouts of the group, with most predictably prescribed event of the lad returning with the shots for which he had been sent forth, erupted, I remained unnerved.
I looked out upon the cast of patrons whom I had attracted, night after night, to this hallowed establishment. A farmer who owned a plot nearby and, as he left his farm unattended when he came here, always traveled with a band of goats tied one to each other in a clump with twine and herded by a determined dog of the shepherding breed. An orchestral bleat alerted us nightly to his arrival. His drink of choice was David Copperfield by Dickens: a nice, round drink. Then there was a mother and son, newly reunited. Part of the estrangement had been due to love of drink, and so the mother drank mock tinctures strictly composed from pages of the dictionary (having no narrative arc, these arbitrary lists of words, though flavorful, did not result in the sort of intense experientiation of composed masterpieces that took heed of Aristotle’s principles of good literature). For the boy, just of age, she would always get something different—Beckett, Joyce, or Mann. A newspaper reporter sipped Swift for hours on end, taking respite in a bar where nothing remarkable that required his reportage ever seemed to transpire. A lute player inhabited the far corner and drank the rhythms of Baudelaire which relieved themselves in the gentle manipulation of his strings; he played his dirges all through the night. There was a time when a poet used to frequent the place, but she became so overcome by the paranoia that, in her intexticated state, she would be so inebriated in the classics that she might succumb to inadvertent plagiarism that would be unrecognizeable to her as imitation in the morning.
This was the tableau of patrons that was assembled on the evening the stranger stepped in. Before she did, as though to announce her presence—though it may also have been a carriage laden with supplies misshapenly passing over the moors, we saw the shadow of an animal pass over the window—as though a whale, swallowing us all like Jonas, making us think that what if we are not all living what we think to be our lives in the digestive rigors of a whale’s belly—our trials, its ribs, our joys sending a stream of water gusting forth like a flare into the slay signaling to the vast ocean that something of import has come to pass.
When she walked in, and I took one look at her, I had a premonition that this woman would be my undoing—or my doing, as it were. With her entered a hound of the most unremarkable light brown color (as though it hated to commit to a hue). Its fur glowed unnaturally blue in the dim candlelight. It looked up at me with tired, red eyes—as though it took great effort for it to angle its gaze, and it seemed to cradle a superfluous monocle in one of its sockets. Its ears hung in flaps on either side and grazed the floor in two lazy trails as it walked. I looked at this mild beast and thought, you, you will deliver me to my tragic end. (I later learned that this bespectacled canine went by the name Miss Eleanor and had, for all intents and purposes, no interest in my murder). The woman calmly seated herself at the bar and awaited my attendance.
The terror! I had dreamed of it for so long and now I would be delivered into death’s tangled grasp—what I would miss most, it suddenly occurred to me, was trying to decipher the mystery of it all; I had grown quite accustomed to my curiosity and was not sure what would animate my thoughts afterwards, if thoughts I would have and if they be animated. The fear rattled my fingertips, so much so that I spilled some dregs of Aphra Behn. I was feeding pages of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks into the machine; the kamikaze drops looked like mottled specks on the triangular tiles of the floor, between the two shiny black tips of my shoes; this was the sort of still, quiet image one should hold, I thought, to be focused on and reflected upon during the impending drama—the candlelight upon my shoes and the steady drip, drop, drip, drop of Buddenbrooks provided the barely perceptible drumbeat of my unfolding climax.
In spite of myself, I caught her eyes for a moment. Her eyes were fringed by a thicket of lashes that seemed beyond what must have been necessary; her face had a sepulchral depth and this moribund countenance did not render her any less deeply beautiful. She had long fingers with which she gripped things with a calculated certainty, giving a sense not only of grasping but of coiling impenetrably her object. A movie played out within her irises; she was, in a way, imagination personified; what she conceived of, one might see by looking into her eyes. One might find this frightening enough, but all the more frightening was when these moving pictures grew dim and her irises reverted to black, a curtain drawn upon her thoughts.
My moment had come, and I so young! I thought, in spite of myself. Perhaps she sensed my ecstasy, but she merely sat patiently and stared ahead. I did not tend to her immediately—I sought to inhabit the moment to its fullest tenor (and speaking of harmonies, the lute player had abandoned the melancholic notes of his pet instrument and was now banging minor chords into the harpsichord). I don’t know why, but I became intent on impressing this strange woman. It was important that she think my death a worthy mission, that she understand the pathos of me in my banal element.
So I wandered my tavern as though I had not a care in the world, guffawing at the farmer’s jokes, nodding seriously at the exchange of wits by the mother and son, leisurely dusting and polishing my finest full volume set of works by Virginia Woolf. I dusted and polished with such fastidiousness of focus that it must have appeared to be the most painstaking concern of my life. I bore such an inflated sense of my own importance to her mission that I fancied often that she must have been following my movements with her eyes, but each time I turned and looked to the bar, I found her eyes fixed resolutely forward, patiently unperturbed by my dilatory meanderings.
Finally, when I could stand the curiosity no longer, I approached her from my station behind the bar. “Hello, Ma’am. You’re just passing through these parts?”
As I peppered the scene with trivialities, I glanced around the room, assessing the patrons now in a new light. Would any of them prove to mitigate my glory? Fancy I had not thought of it before—I might have amassed a more intentional group of clientele to witness my Grand Exit. At least there would be someone to immortalize the evening in print, I thought, glancing at the newspaper reporter (though, to be honest, the absent poet may have been more to my liking—more gleaming, befitting the ardor of the situation). Nevertheless, I supposed a mere rendition of the facts would do just as well, if those facts themselves be fantastic. I took a furtive survey of my surroundings, making sure there was no potential for a hapless individual to play the hero, to “rescue” me from my glorious fate in a hedonistic conflagration of attention; for once the hero arrives upon the scene, my role as victim would be thrust into the background, my presence and my fame would become protagonistically redundant.
“What can I get for you?” My tone was measured, expert.
“I am not here for a drink, sir. I have come for the land upon which we stand.”
“My family has owned this land for at least a hundred years,” I announced to her, my palms wet with the sheen of anticipation at this promising conflict of interest.
“Yes, but before that there lived upon it a single man in a single house.”
“You have come to retrieve the remains of the house?”
“I have come for the bones of the man.”
And then she proceeded to relate her story. She had travelled (with Miss Eleanor) hundreds of miles in search of this land. How could she be sure the house had stood in this very spot? She knew it to be so—the hound, less imposing without her monocle, concurred. “I have been sent as an envoy from my people,” the strange woman said. I saw in her irises their vast farmlands, overcome by hordes of boll weevils carving out circles within circles whose paths, viewed in their right way, appeared to be the outlines of roses. She told me that a pestilence had overocme their crop; the cows had begun to fall dead of no provocation at all; some unholy spirit wracked the house which, after some particularities of the hauntings, they had deduced to be the uneasy apparition of this avuncular ancestor, who had been turned out for some unpardonable offense in the twilight of his lifetime and had made some pronouncement under the sun as he backed away from them, that he would build his own house of which he would not be only king but also courtier, not only groundskeeper but also garden. His torso—for he would not let them see his fading back—grew smaller and smaller as he backed away into the distance, a small almost comical featureless silhouette in the spotlight of a red-orange sun balanced on the horizon. So he built a sprawling house with a porch and a weather vane. One day, the house, desiring to be a person, had taken it upon itself to walk the world in the guise of the old man. The old man, evicted from his body by this Frankensteinian edifice, watched his neglected panels fall into disrepair. Perhaps, the old man did not appreciate how the profligate house was whiling away its life, and so on a short return from one of his sojourns, the old man—in the form of the house—orchestrated a grand collapse upon his own house, in the form of his body. It was a tidy affair altogether, as neither man nor house was heard from again.
“I have come to free his spirit and thereby lift the pestilence that terrorizes our farm.”
I had to tell her—this could not be! My death must occur upon the ground of the tavern; I must be buried beneath it or above it or around it, and remain thus in perpetuity, my grave visage hanging over the counter for future generations. This was the glory for which I had been groomed; the death for which I had been bred! “With all due respect, this tavern is my birthright and I am not prepared to give it up duly, without a proper duel,” I answered.
The stranger reached into her cloak; I thought, perhaps, for a dagger, but instead she produced two shot glasses. “I challenge you to a Duel of the Literati,” she said.
The game took place as such: We sat across from each other at a small round table on the floor of the tavern. To the haphazard rising tune of the harpsichord, the news reporter flitting about us in circles in his hawkish way, seeming to be everywhere at once, the mother and son finding it increasingly difficult to continue their discourse in the face of this growing cynosure were drawn into the circle. And so we had our audience; I would like to think that they were rooting for me to keep the land out of a sense of loyalty and that their breath caught in the moment between every reveal.
My oldest regular took upon the role of master of the game. He liquified pages upon pages, shot after shot, banging two at a time on the table. I and the stranger took a swig and identified the piece of literature. I would look away, gaze at the ornate patterns on the tin ceiling, pretend to play with a piece of dirt on the tile with the black tip of my boot—thinking—hoping!—that perhaps she might poison my drink. But still we persisted, shot after shot, neck and neck. I felt as though I had trained for this duel all my life; my entire being seemed to participate in it: Middlemarch, The Rape of the Lock, Heart of Darkness! I found myself screaming the names increasingly as the game went on; the stranger retained her composure and did no such thing, calmly stating her identifications with the infinite grace that was her wont. I must have stood up at some point, found myself jumping from foot to foot like a primate. I was dizzy with the hysteria. I was dizzy also, I think, with the realization that this tragedy was not in store for me upon this night, and that I might continue to live and that, if I fell victim to a single error, I might lose the land beneath the tavern that was my birthright—that it would be for this that I would be remembered—a Paradise Lost worthy of its Miltonian posturing.
Then, in a flash, it came to me. I knew what to do. I took my seat calmly; I looked into her irises—I saw in them a mirror of myself sitting at this chair taking this shot, almost as though I had willed it. YES, I thought, I would watch my own end in her eyes, and it would be glorious! I had decided: I would let her win. I would lose, and in doing so, I would fling myself into the most spectacular death of all: OBSCURITY. My progeny would walk the earth for the rest of time, their allusionistic legacy completely unknown to them—like phantoms, they would feel the tug of their destiny, but they would never know to what they were called. They would not know to transform liquor into literature.
I now live on a small side street in Sussex, England, where I am assistant to a seller of rivets. My past is known to no one in town. I will live out my days and nights here and die a quiet death. I will always remember that once I was in possession of a class of liquors most unusual, and you will remember that I am the one known as the last of the Allusionists.
To die is simpler than anyone supposes, and subtler.