He yawns, and his face relaxes.
My brain-damaged mother often talks in her sleep to her dead husband in complete sentences, holding a conversation in which she asks him questions and responds to answers that only she hears, while her voice remains steady and low, and, though unsated, fatigued in sleepless sleep, she awaits answers that may imperil her contentment.
The Turkish poet drops his head, like a supplicant or penitent, and there's muttering in the tremulous semi-dark. "But even so," he protests, in a low, guttural monotone, "I can believe truly for more sex in everything." With his head down, he slaps the table. "More sex in everything" raised, apparently, for my benefit, since he's inexplicably insisted on this point to me before, but not in such a strange context. The young married man's voice comes in a cry from across the room, he must be far from me or the table: "You're all crazy, this is nuts, but Arthur's right, I'm here, and I'm sitting in this crazy room with you. But so's the devil, he's in this room, you know, he must be. He's in me, I'm evil, and that's my perverted wisdom." I hear a bizarre, intermittent cackling and chortling from him, but others say he ranted about ravishing infidelities and an insatiable hunger for stray women, even on his marriage day, when he had sex with his best man's girlfriend behind a boathouse. Two years later, his best man died in a boating accident, in a motorboat stored in the adulterous boathouse, and it is to him he addresses himself, begging him to return so he can ask forgiveness. Between the scratchy noises or static, I believe I hear him calling a name over and over, until the young married man sobs, I hear him, I do, I know it's not me. Contesa and Moira awaken or sleepwalk over to him, to wherever he's gone, to comfort him.
— The devil's here? Come on.
That's Spike.
— No one said this would be easy, a voice says.
That's Henry, I'm pretty sure.
— That's right.
Arthur is agreeing with him.
I press my eyes closed more tightly and assure myself it's not bizarre, just uncanny, when raging fires and words written in scarlet ink cross my eyes, the Reverend Samuel Willard's account of Elizabeth Knapp, a Salem girl possessed by the deviclass="underline" The devil has oftentimes appeared to her, presenting the treaty of a covenant, that he urged upon her constant temptations to murder her parents, her neighbors, our children, especially the youngest, tempting her to throw it in the fire.
I night have recited this to everyone, I'm not sure if I'm speaking or when I'm speaking what I'm saying. In my head, I'm awake, aware of everything, the way I am when I'm breathing nitrous oxide, inhaling its sweet sickness, on the chair of my earnest periodontist, who keeps the radio tuned to public stations, whose programs become confused with my thoughts, so I may be speaking aloud to the host and his guests, but then I don't care, because waves of pleasure slap inside my body, during which my periodontist often asks me to open my mouth wider, but I believe my mouth is open wide.
— My skin is so dry, you can write on it. I need to shed it.
— Like a snake.
That's Spike speaking, after me. Maybe I told her human beings shed their skin completely every twenty-eight days. No one Spike loves is dead, and she doesn't know what she's doing here, except hanging out, so she proposes in a singsong voice to implore Einstein to return, which strikes her, a young mathematician, as ridiculously comic and tragic, so she can barely sit still, jumps away from the table, and races out of the room through the wooden, double doors, only to return, because she doesn't know where she is otherwise or what to do, and she may anyway be asleep. I don't know how much time has passed, when the Count rouses himself. I'm sure my eyes are open, I see him as plain as day tuck his Breguet into his coat pocket, satisfied it won't be pickpocketed again, then watch him as he gathers himself together to address the Magician, Contesa, or his lost wife, sometime before I rouse myself and say whatever they tell me I did, about which I have intermittent and vague recollections. The Magician hasn't talked yet with his mother, though she's the dead person he wanted to contact, the motive for the seance-which is no longer a seance to me; I don't know what it is, except an extension of so-called reality into so-called hyperreality or unreality, though in my head nothing is unreal, I don't know what unreal is. Dizzily, I try to catch hold of it, it slides away, splitting into pieces.
The Count murmurs and rises, even more angular than I recall, in shadow he's a portrait by El Greco, and he flings and jiggles his arms, maybe pushing off something, a spirit, but that's unlikely, since it wouldn't have mass. The Count's voice sounds dreamy, even though he appears to be lecturing someone, partly because he's standing at attention as if behind a lectern, but his eyes are shut and there are many pauses between his words: My rare horological artifacts. French and English, I bow to their artistry. Serviceable clocks, to be blunt, ugh, grandfathers, grandmothers, wall units. Comme it faut. American Blind Watch, yes, ingenious. Big numbers for the vision impaired. Ingenious.
He swings his arms again and yawns.
— Let me say this about the deviclass="underline" He exists. Made his acquaintance, many years ago in the South. My family, in my town. I ran as far as I could. RUN. I told you to run. You. Not to leave me. Run from me, and now you're. A barn door face. You said it. I don't know where. No answer is an answer… My darling, when I leave this world and join you, to be with you again, wherever you are, would you… Oh, please, let me leave this necropolis.
Perfectly still, not shuffling and shifting, we're waiting for the end or hanging on to dear life, expecting to hear another outburst about what the dead have in store for us.
The Count drops to his seat, breathless, as if he had been running, and his head also drops, like Contesa's, and rests on the table, where soon he falls asleep or slides into elsewhere. I'm witness and participant, spilling from one to the other, I can't tell inside from outside, I mean, I can't control my utterances or guide my thoughts.
— Helen, Helen. Listen to me, you're safe here.
It's the Magician's mellow voice.
— No, I'm not.
— Helen, it's your turn.
— No, it's not. It's…
I point to our Felice and our Kafka, but they are fast asleep or dead to the practical world.
— This is not what I believe at all. What's happening is unacceptable to me.
— Be yourself, the Magician says. Use your intuition.
— I hate that stuff. I think I'm dead.
— Maybe you are.
— That's all right then.
— Stop fighting.
I'm always fighting, I shake myself, I may not be dead, but I don't want to withdraw from this ghost theater in which I'm a spectacle to myself and where I must shuck off disbelief to reap any benefit, though benefit is unlikely. I will disbelief, and this is when the events occur for which I was definitely present and also not. I let my body slacken, knowing my father preferred me to sit up straight, while mentally urging him near me and invoking his spirit, thinking my posture shouldn't matter anymore to him.
— I want to… I'd like my father to talk to me. And my dead friends, I really want to hear their voices again.
I announce this abruptly.
— But I know it can't happen.
I need to concentrate on one dead person, my father, instead other faces crystallize with wispy features and deathly poor complexions, they zoom in and out, stagger by, now my dead friends' faces, their deaths cavorting in a murderers' row, where arbitrary mortality judges and sickens me. I open my eyes and with horror notice the other sitters' critical expressions, so I might be on a jury, I'm litigious, American, I like to watch vicious trials, I'm probably a judge. My breathing quickens, then slows, quickens, then regulates itself, so I forget it, but my sweater scratches me like crazy, I could suffocate inside my skin, I need air, melancholiacs are helped by a change in air. I command myself to smash the decayed faces thrust in front of mine.