Absolutely. Maybe the play too.
The play? Oh Val, that would be wonderful.
That ended the conversation.
Once again the disturbing thought arose: how long will this peace and quiet last? It was almost too good, the way things were going. I thought of Hokusai, his ups and downs, his 967 changes of address, his perseverance, his incredible production. What a life! And I, I was only On the threshold. Only if I lived to be ninety or a hundred would I have something to show for my labors.
Another almost equally disturbing thought entered my head. Would I ever write anything acceptable?
The answer which came at once to my lips was: Fuck a duck!
Still another thought now came to mind. Why was I so obsessed about truth?
And the answer to that also came clear and clean. Because there is only the truth and nothing but the truth.
But a wee small voice objected, saying: Literature is something else again,
Then to hell with literature! The book of life, that’s what I would write.
And whose name will you sign to it?
The Creator’s.
That seemed to settle the matter.
The thought of one day tackling such a book—the book of life—kept me tossing all night. It was there before my closed eyes, like the Fata Morgana of legend. Now that I had vowed to make it a reality, it loomed far bigger, far more difficult of accomplishment than when I had spoken about it. It seemed overwhelming, indeed. Nevertheless, I was certain of one thing—it would flow once I began it. It wouldn’t be a matter of squeezing out drops and trickles. I thought of that first book I had written, about the twelve messengers. What a miscarriage! I had made a little progress since then, even if no one but myself knew it. But what a waste of material that was! My theme should have been the whole eighty or a hundred thousand whom I had hired and fired during those sizzling cosmococcic years. No wonder I was constantly losing my voice. Merely to talk to that many people was a feat. But it wasn’t the talk alone, it was their faces, the expressions they wore—grief, anger, deceit, cunning, malice, treachery, gratitude, envy, and so on—as if, instead of human beings, I were dealing with totemistic creatures: the fox, the lynx, the jackal, the crow, the lemming, the magpie, the dove, the musk-ox, the snake, the crocodile, the hyena, the mongoose, the owl … Their images were still fresh in my memory, the good and the bad, the crooks and the liars, the cripples, the maniacs, the tramps, the gamblers, the leeches, the perverts, the saints, the martyrs, all of them, the ordinary ones and the extraordinary ones. Even down to a certain lieutenant of the Horse Guard whose face had been so mutilated—by the Reds or the Blacks—that when he laughed he wept and when he wept he jubilated. Whenever he addressed me—usually to make a complaint—he stood at attention, as if he were the horse not the guard. And the Greek with the long equine face, a scholar unquestionably, who wanted to read from Prometheus Bound—or was it unbound? Why was it, much as I liked him, that he always roused my scorn and ridicule? How much more interesting and more lovable was that wall-eyed Egyptian with sex on the brain! Always in hot water, especially if he failed to jerk off once or twice a day. And that Lesbian, Iliad, she called herself—why Iliad?—so lovely, so demure, so coy … an excellent musician too. I know because she brought her fiddle to the office one evening and played for me. And after she had rendered her Bach, her Mozart, her Paganini repertoire, she has the gall to inform me that she’s tired of being a Lesbian, wants to be a whore, and wouldn’t I please find her a better office building to work in, one where she could drum up a little business.
They were all there parading before me as of yore—with their tics, their grimaces, their supplications, their sly little tricks. Every day they were dumped on my desk out of a huge flour sack, it seemed—they, their troubles, their problems, their aches and pains. Maybe when I was selected for this odious job some one had tipped off the big Scrabblebuster and said: Keep this man good and busy! Put his feet in the mud of reality, make his hair stand on end, feed him bird lime, destroy his every last illusion! And whether he had been tipped off or not, that old Scrabblebuster had done just that. That and a little more. Ho made me acquainted with grief and sorrow.; However … among the thousands who came and went, who begged, whistled and wept before me naked, bereft, making their last call, as it were, before turning themselves in at the slaughter-house, there appeared now and then a jewel of a guy, usually from some far off place, a Turk perhaps or a Persian. And like that, there happened along one day this All something or other, a Mohammedan, who had acquired a divine calligraphy somewhere in the desert, and after he gets to know me, know that I am a man with big ears, he writes me a letter, a letter thirty-two pages long, with never a mistake, never a comma or a semi-colon missing, and in it he explains (as if it were important for me to know) that the miracles of Christ—he went into them one by one—were not miracles at all, that they had all been performed before, even the Resurrection, by unknown men, men who understood the laws of nature, laws which, he insisted, our scientists know nothing about, but which were eternal laws and could be demonstrated to produce so-called miracles whenever the right man came along … and he, All, was in possession of the secret, but I was not to make it known because he, Ali, had chosen to be a messenger and wear the badge of servitude for a reason known only to him and to Allah, bless his name, but when the time came I had only to say the word and so forth and so on…
How had I managed to leave out all these divine behemoths and the ruckus they were constantly creating, me up on the carpet every few days to explain this and explain that, as if I had instigated their peculiar, inexplicably screwy behavior. Yeah, what a job trying to convince the big shot (with the brain of a midget) that the flower of America was seeded from the loins of these crack-pots, these monsters, these hair-brained idiots who, whatever the mischief, were possessed of strange talents such as the ability to read the Cabala backwards, multiply ten columns of figures at a time or sit on a cake of ice and manifest signs of fever. None of these explanations, of course, could alleviate the horrendous fact that an elderly woman had been raped the night before by a swarthy devil delivering a death message.
It was tough. I never could make things clear to him. Any more than I could present the case for Tobachnikov, the Talmudic student, who was the nearest replica of the living Christ that ever walked the streets of New York with Happy Easter messages in his hand. How could I say to him, this owl of a boss: This devil needs help. His mother is dying of cancer, his father peddles shoe laces all day, the pigeons are crippled. (The ones that used to make the synagogue their home.) He needs a raise. He needs food in his belly.
To astonish him or intrigue him, I would sometimes relate little anecdotes about my messengers, always using the past tense as if about some one who had once been in the service (though he was there all the time, right up my Sleeve, securely hidden away in Px or FU office.) Yes, I’d say, he was the accompanist of Johanna Gadski, when they were on tour in the Black Forest. Yes (about another), he once worked with Pasteur at the famous Institute in Paris. Yes (still another), he went back to India to finish His History of the World in four languages. Yes (a parting shot), he was one of the greatest jockeys that ever lived; made a fortune after he left us, then fell down an elevator shaft and smashed his skull.
And what was the invariable response? Very interesting, indeed. Keep up the good work. Remember, hire nothing but nice clean boys from good families. No Jews, no cripples, no ex-convicts. We want to be proud of our messenger force.
Yes, sir!
And by the way, see that you clean out all these niggers you’ve got on the force. We don’t want our clients to be scared out of their wits.
Yes, sir!
And I would go back to my perch, do a little shuffling, scramble them up a bit, but never fire a soul, not even if he were as black as the ace of spades.
How did I ever manage to leave them out of the messenger book, all these lovely dementia praecox cases, these star rovers, these diamond-backed logicians, these battle-scarred epileptics, thieves, pimps, whores, defrocked priests and students of the Talmud, the Cabala and the Sacred Books of the East? Novels! As if one could write about such matters, such specimens, in a novel. Where, in such a work, would one place the heart, the liver, the optic nerve, the pancreas or the gall bladder? They were not fictitious, they were alive, every one of
