My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (12 page)

Mason climbed the darkness, his feet locating steps and at an unlighted door—the only one—he knocked twice. Odd place to hold forth: upstairs over a triperie on rue de Boucherie near rue du Marché. The door opened and Doctor Wongo with bandy legs and protruding teeth seemed to fill it. His thick lips were purple. No extended hand? Lights poured down from irregular ceiling beams. Doctor Wongo made a display of examining the time. His watch sparkled on his wrist. His voice was full of sandblasted rock. “You're two minutes early. Please wait.” Wongo closed the door and Mason felt the suction and the uprush of a draft from below. He kicked the railing. A minute and a half later Doctor Wongo came for him. Inside, Mason's eyes burned. The wall to his left contained two windows and between them were wall-hooks and straps for arms and feet. In the right corner: a large metal tub filled with what appeared to be steaming hot water. Doctor Wongo was grinning at Mason's bewilderment. “I'm approved by the World Health Organization, you know . . . Your problem?” Somehow the question was too clinical with a commercial edge: a red herring. There was detachment here. And mystery. A huge wooden cross graced yet another wall. Blood stains? Yes, but very dry, very old. “Sit
down, my son,” said the African, “here, on the floor with me; tell me
all
about it.” Following Doctor Wongo's lead, Mason sat on one of the large cushions in the middle of the room. Then Mason said, “I see myself trapped in an air-conditioned hotel room somewhere . . . I want to—to . . . Somebody is trying to get a message to me but I'm in a remote part of the world. I'm guilty, like Kafka. The message might have something to do with my release: no separation of body and spirit possible. But I'm not sure . . . My children condemn me. Or did I simply dream that? Or they worship me too much . . . Somehow I'm part of a plot: a scheme: I'm supposed to free a girl held captive. Exactly where, I don't know. I can hear her speak, ‘My parents must not know . . . ’ Army guns are stacked in my closet. I have no idea how they got there. I keep expecting to be arrested and, uh, I've done nothing. I tell you I've done no wrong!” As Mason spoke Doctor Wongo played with the handcuffs suspended from his belt. Then the doctor spoke: “I can nail you to that—” (indicating the cross) “or there—you can experience The Saint Sebastian Redemptive Method.” He gestured toward the straps. “There's another method: you get into a tomb and I close you in: it's called The Martyr Saving Plan. That tub is our little swim: it's The Guilt Absorption Baptism. Downstairs in the cave we have the furnace for severe cases.” Doctor Wongo grinned. “It's very hot . . . I'd suggest you take the Saint Sebastian route. Why? Because the arrows are tiny and the sting not so great. The scars vanish quickly. Nail marks from the MSP wouldn't.” Mason was suspicious. He knew Doctor Wongo could see his mood. The doctor held up a firm hand. He blew his whistle. “Please. Undress.” Mason hesitated, started to speak but Wongo beat him. “You've used up all your rope. The System has very highly developed ways of getting the Right Angle on an Instrument. If you want release from it and yourself you must obey. This is the right place. There's no army guns in my closet: only peace and love. Undress.” Stripped, Mason stood before the seated guru. Wongo's face changed as he peered sternly at the emblem branded on Mason's chest. “You poor boy you.” Doctor Wongo
wagged his head in mock despair. “Take the Saint Sebastian. I firmly recommend it.” To rebel along traditional lines? Rubbish! Mason shook his head no. He'd go for the tub. Water. Warmth. Womb stuff. Pleasure? “It's very hot, son. But if that's what you want . . . ”

Spring was a gentle wrestler holding the body of Nice in an agonizing embrace. Then he made her kiss the canvas. The sky cleared. Mason's first lecture for IHICE would take place the last week of April, two weeks away, at The American College in Paris. What was this intense windstorm blowing inside? . . . Alpes-Maritimes Agency d'Immobilieres'd located a furnished three room apartment for him up on the old Roman Road, Route de Bellet. He could move in the first of May . . . He'd bought a lemon: a Simca, new and blue and difficult. Parking was a hassle . . . The morning he started driving toward Paris he felt he was in a struggle buggy about to fall apart. Looseness always bothered him. By the time he reached Aix he was cursing himself for not having gotten the Renault. Then just north of the view of Mont Sainte Victoire, as he felt the geometry of Cezanne's landscape, in a BMW speeding South, on the other side, he was sure he saw—would you believe?—Edith Levine: in the passenger seat. The guy driving looked Italian or French. Small world? Mason toyed with the idea of exiting and following her—just to
see
but the next exit was twenty minutes later and by then, well, forget it. He stopped at Arles. The outlying areas, farmland, hadn't changed since that strange, tormented painter cut off his ear here, in, was it 1888. The city itself was strictly tourist: complete with sidewalk cafes, the type with metal chairs and tables. The drawbridge no longer existed but they'd built a replica. The house he briefly shared with that sailor of the South Sea Islands was bombed during Hitler's efforts to construct his
own Roman Empire. Roman ruins in the old center. The postman and his wife were not in sight. The lamplighted cafe . . . ? The glare of the lighted billiards table. Mason spent the night here—not wanting to push too hard through the late afternoon and early night: and risk not finding a room. He checked into a hotel called Hotel Malchance. He didn't pay any attention. He was tired. Huge succulent plants lined the stairway up to the second floor where he had a room at the end of the hall. After a shower he lay on the bed. Edith . . . in France? Edith: twenty-one-year-old Jewish Princess from Brooklyn. Calling her a princess was like somebody calling him a nigger. At least Princess was capitalized. Graduated with a bachelor's in sociology from City. She'd irregular, crooked ways even back in sixty-seven: lifting money from his wallet, selling dope to pay back university loans. He always suspected she
sold
a little ass once in awhile. Gave away a lot, too. In that car today she was dressed to kill: decked with tons of jewels. A new, upswept hairdo. Back in the old days she was a rags-and-feather hippie. Edith had blown flower petal in cops' faces while dancing around them with other hippies in a mad frenzy of corolla and incantations. She had inbred dignity but she was a fink. Even stole from her analyst. But that wasn't so bad ’cause he stole from her too: a huge waste of her father's money. A chronic liar, she used to fake orgasm—but was unable to let herself
go:
to go meant a loss of control—the fucking abyss, in all its irrecoverable large-capacity garbage bag full of anal-tight
nothingness
. Not coming was a defense: a fortress against the brain-shit of the world. She held back except once when she asked him to spank her. She lay across his lap and he whacked her like her dad used to do: she produced, out of her twat, one drop of perfume—smelled like Evening in Paris or Sunrise in Lower Manhattan. He now closed his eyes. Lying prone. Release. He could see her big cayenne-pink hindquarters now, the curl of light pubic hair there at the crack. When his palm struck the flesh there was bounce-back shudders from the hip flash. These were not hard. Not hard enough for her taste. He? He didn't especially dislike it but it was boring: did nothing for his
erection. He never did it again and they grew farther apart sexually: she had her own life, he had his. And they had only some vague thing together. Once at a dance party Edith almost got fucked against her will. She only wanted to flirt but the yellow nigger she was belly rubbing with twirled her away off the dance floor, danced her into a dark room from which she shot distressed and yelping five minutes later. Mason was pissed at her stupidity and that night they fought. But she was a smart cookie: she knew the problems of America and could talk them in scientific terms. Her command of higher math awed Mason. She knew changing birth rates by religion; crime rates by ethnic groups; death rates, income rates, you name it. Medians, scales, variables. She used, in their daily life, the jargon: and after a while Mason felt like he had cabin fever . . . There was the time her father came over. They'd been together a year. Mason was nervous before his arrival: rare is the white man who accepts the black mate of his daughter. Edith's father, kicked out of the family, now ran a fruit vending business up in the Bronx on Pinkney Avenue for his cousin. The old guy got a lot of colored customers from the Boston Road area (“I
know
colored real well—they buy from me . . . ”) buying his rotten citric “wares”—so said Edith. Maybe Edith was a cold fish and had no integrity but she did write to Mason once while he was in the joint. That was more than he could say for, well, a lot of so-called compassionate friends. When he got out he and Edith had dinner together at Ratner's on First—where the waiters (very old Jewish guys) gave them dirty looks. They
knew.
Her pie had a huge green
dead
fly stuck in its whipped cream. Well, you could say old guys had bad eyesight, but . . . Such events gave Mason jungle fever. There were times when they were left too long waiting for service in places where the waiters weren't busy. She once said, “New York Jews have some
nerve
hating Black people: a
defenseless
group . . . after the Jewish experience . . . ” As a child she'd been to Israel with her parents. Her Brooklyn high school teacher “made” her “lecture” on it: the one thing she wanted to say she never said. She went around for weeks telling her friends she was
an altruist—not a Jew. Edith was Edith. There was no figleaf covering her crotch: even if she couldn't come. Judaism sort of embarrassed her. And she had no intention of becoming a Christian. She liked Mason because, she said, he was gentle and immoral, beyond sin, beyond crime; existential. Plus he
liked
women. When he fell asleep that night in Arles he found himself not in Van Gogh's house but in Cezanne's: upstairs in the place on the hillside in Aix-en-Provence. Cezanne, in a stained suit—complete with vest—was sitting on a stool, before a canvas. He held his pallet with thumb and fingers of the left hand. His sharp eyes darted from the long, bored body of his son, slouched in a chair, to the half finished painting of him, on the easel. Mason left Cezanne to work. Down the hall and stairway, out into the garden. Skylight was rare here: the trees were thick and close together: it was like having a deliberate roof. He walked peacefully under the shelter.

It might be safe over here to quietly assume his “rightful” identity again. Do a few readings for the bread, which he needed already. Signard, head of the International Humanities Institute for Cultural Exchange's Speakers' Bureau had already expressed interest in response to his, Mason's letter from Nice. Hence this trip . . . Not likely to bump into hellcat Brad? or agents from MRF? . . . But surely that woman was
Edith!

Paris, Paris! IHICE kept a low-profile: entrance in a court-way (not visible from street) of an old apartment building across the street from the famed cemetery called Père Lachaise. After Signard, a quirky little man, gave Mason an
advanced check and his itinerary (he'd read at the University of Paris to a class of grad students studying contemporary American fiction) the booking agent walked out onto Avenue Gambetta with Mason and expressed his delight in the beautiful weather. He also told Mason that the university people would wine and dine him either before or after the event. Mason watched him talk. Signard twitched as he reached for Mason's hand. At that moment another man approached. Signard showed signs of recognition, if not delight. The guy looked familiar to Mason. Very! The fact got his fear churning again. Signard made a nervous leap, yanking the two—Mason and the new-arriver—together; meanwhile, forcing their hands together and introducing them at the same time. Mister Familiar's name was Alm Harr Fawond. Arab? But . . . the American accent? Anyway, the moment lasted less than the time it takes a fly to tune his legs. Then Mason was on his way, with not a second thought.

In search of Richard Wright's ashes, he entered the cemetery's profusion of gravestone and leaf and although he didn't find Wright hidden at the foot of a stairway to vaults, he found the lonely graves of Stein and Modigliani and, yes, Balzac and Roussel and one big, blunt tomb marked simply, “Family Radiguet.” Bewildered, he came out at a brisk pace . . . But Mason wasn't ready for Paris. One bookstore on the Left bank was full of giddy young Americans. Plus he couldn't find his own name (the one, I mean, that he insisted was his) on any spine on the shelves. Pigalle was a flesh hustle that bored him. The lines were too long at the museums. Night life was more expensive than it was worth. He thought of going out to Auvers-sur-Oise to lie down on the bed-springs in the tiny room where Van Gogh died, just to feel, or try to feel, the weight of his own body in that moment. No, there was no good reason to spend a lot of time in
Paris. He'd give the reading, go to dinner with his hosts, then split for Nice.

Back in Nice he moved into the whitewashed apartment. Sold the Trojan Horse—his Simca. Got a Fiat. Felt better. Changed from BNP to Credit Lyonnais. The labyrinthian estate was owned by an Italian family, the Rosatis. The villa itself was a credible altar to the sun overlooking the sea. The owner's villa was up at the northern end of the estate. Downstairs beneath Mason's tiny place lived the Barilis. Madame and Monsieur Barili worked for the Rosatis. Mainly they cared for and puzzled over the sturdy carnations. They also exorcised and harvested the pears, grapes, cherries, plums, olives, in season. Rosati—a frail, tiny old man, his wife, daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren—also worked the land. Being here for Mason was like being in parentheses. Yet—something in Barili's eye. A charm? the look of a spell weaver? Mason felt the eye of a fiend upon him when he passed the fat dark Italian. Surely he was not some diabolical version of The Impostor? That elusive renegade couldn't possibly be
here!
Here was no place for a prince of rogues: Pegasus somehow had connected the earth and heaven. Every day Mason saw sea horses down there flying up out of blue . . . Yet he couldn't get over the feeling of being a lame duck. Next door? In the big apartment lived five women and two men. Mason saw them going and coming. Their motorbikes parked out in the drive. While taking his garbage down to the roadside one morning he met one of the young women—Monique. Since he'd left coffee brewing on the stove, he invited her up for a cup. Skullduggery? She had dark hair and a shy face. While they drank the bitter brew at his kitchen table they heard the Barilis out in the yard. Some wild smell was in the air. Mason went to the window. Behind him Monique said, “These blood I cannot
watch.” Mason saw Madame Barili carrying two rabbits by their hind legs. Her husband waited for her by the clothesline where four other—skinned and pink—rabbits were hung by their legs. Monsieur Barili took one of the two rabbits from his wife. Holding it by its hind legs, he quickly, expertly, drove the tip of the blade into the animal's neck—just behind its jaw. Then he stood holding it like that till most of the blood had poured out onto the ground. The other long-eared creatures squirmed and squeaked. Madame Barili, stocky, tough, socked them both on their heads with her fist. They went into shock. Then Monsieur Barili gave his wife the head-end of the still dripping hare. He slit it down the stomach as she held tightly. He then ripped the pelt off as she clung to her end. After that one was hung on the line, she handed him another live one. Mason turned back to Monique. She drained her coffee cup. “I hear the mailman's motorbike.” She stood. “Merci. Au revoir.” When the postman came up rather than leaving mail in the boxes down by the road he had a package or an express letter. Mason walked down with her. One of the cats, the black and white one, that hung around the estate came from nowhere and rubbed herself against Mason's jeans. The mailman was coming toward them, looking bewildered. “Pardon. Monsieur, s'il vous plait?” He took the letters and thanked the man. The special delivery was from Schnitzler in London and there was something from Professor Jean Claude Bouffault with the university's return address. Monique was teasing the postman for not bringing her any letters. She told Mason, after the motorbike left the yard, that she had to meet a friend for lunch. This was her day off. What kind of work did she do, where was she from, what were her beliefs, her past? This was not the time, not the place. Eh? Smoke came their way in a sudden gust. He watched her slender body, her shapely bottom as she went toward her Honda parked under the big olive tree at the corner of the yard. . . . Then he went and sat on his doorstep and opened the letter from Schnitzler. He was trying to arrange a lecture/reading tour for Mason in England but probably wouldn't have anything finalized till Fall, when the
academic year started up again. Bouffault's letter contained an invitation to take part in a detective writers' conference to be held here in Nice at the university. Bouffault explained that he knew Mason wasn't exactly a detective writer but he thought Mason might find the three-day event fun. There would be detective fans and writers from all over.