I have changed my mind.
The personage sitting across the table from me, at a table with a view of the ocean and several rooftops belonging to the coastal city, did not blink, did not move, in fact never moved, not once, and after I had repeated myself twice more I left.
Nobody interfered with me as I walked out, which is unusual. Part of me, to tell the truth, had been hoping for a little immediate interference, which is quite standard and would likely have encouraged me to undertake a course of action that could have significantly minimized the interference that followed.
I thought of the woman with the cigar and of the cigar inserted into the center of her stutter all the way back to the hotel where they were sleeping in.
I thought, also, of an old man I once saw smoking a small homemade cigar through a hole in his throat and how that man had only had one eye and something very wrong with one arm.
That place was far away from anywhere anybody has ever known me.
And I think that soon, very soon, I will go away, to such a place, to stay. Even if once I arrive I find myself obliged to sit in close quarters with just such an old man, smoking, in just such fashion, etc.
Which is to say that, getting ahead of myself again, if you have never smelled it, then you should never have to smell it — the smell, I mean, of burning flesh.
She was not sleeping in. She was sitting up in bed and looking across the room to the window, which had a view much like the one I had seen from the room I had just left. Here, however, there was a certain amount of that fine winter light that comes into such rooms at such times in such parts of the world, and it was falling across her knees and her bare arms wrapped around her knees, which were pulled close to her chest, and a line of light was running along one of her forearms, and she was smiling.
It was stupid, really stupid, all things considered, to have agreed to it, and then to have changed my mind. It was even stupider not to have thought to smooth it out. While not necessarily encouraged, a certain amount of noncompliance is admitted by the organization, and it would have been straightforward enough both to have failed to carry out my assignment and to have mitigated the significant recrimination I could now look forward to. Of course I had thought about it. There was an easy way. Much about the business is actually quite easy once you’ve been at it a while. I could have, for example, picked up the phone, or at the very least double-checked the address of the package I had dropped in the mail on my way back from telling them that I had changed my mind. But there is in me a small speck of something hard, something stubborn, something immensely intractable, and I didn’t.
There, in the center of the cigar smoke, she had used the word “important,” and I was to think of that word a little later, as I sat there, thinking of preposterous causalities and staring at those shelves.
That afternoon the four of us drove away. We had been to the city I had suggested. Now we were going to the country.
2
WE QUICKLY FOUND EXCELLENT LODGINGS. The old house, in which no one else was staying, had huge rooms, high ceilings, wide hallways, and one or two windowless staircases in addition to the regular one. I did not like these windowless staircases and generally avoided them. Once, though, late at night, in fact the last night, I woke and strayed and met an old man on one of the staircases, an old man I will more properly introduce later, who stood in what should have been absolute dark with what seemed to be a pale light falling onto and around him, and who said to me, listen, listen to what I have to say just a little more. Also, there were a rather unusual number of toilets in the house, some of them small and inexplicably dark even with the lights on, and one night walking by one of them I thought I heard someone praying, or at any rate mumbling rhythmically, on the other side of the door. The house did not have a garden, or rather had for its garden the whole countryside, so that lithe, dark trees seemed always to be waving in a soft evening wind. Our room, on the sunny side of the house, had a yellow door, a silver door handle, a pale blue dresser, darker yellow walls, white moldings, three large windows, those translucent curtains, dark green shutters, a washbasin, a hardwood floor that creaked in four spots, two lamps, two small tables, a silver candelabra, a long mirror slightly cracked in the top left corner, a desk with two drawers, two round floor rugs, a wastepaper basket, a vase that contained a quantity of dried flowers varied in shape and color and tone, one comfortable chair, one desk chair, a faded print in a chipped gilt frame that showed the proceedings of a circus, a huge bed with curtains hung around it, and two very slow old flies buzzing lowly. The circus. John, it seems to me, at some point had something to say about the circus, but about the gladiator-stick-you-with-large-forks-style one, about some place one could visit where the old fork-style circuses had been held. This gladiator business has always seemed improbable to me. Once, as a boy, I put on a suit of plastic armor and took up a plastic lance or sword or club and was pummeled by my friends. That pummeling ended what had been a long-standing interest in the glory, not to mention effectiveness, of knights and their shining armor, and probably preempted any interest I might later have developed in gladiators. Anyway, I prefer the regular kind of circus, she said. As, I said, do I. What was the best thing you ever saw in the circus? I told her about an elephant. And also about some fleas. We both liked fleas. And clowns. Soon our room contained other things, some of which we had acquired on the drive, such as a funny pinwheel that had put her in mind of a strange story, some of which, like the row of insect wings, we had found in the course of our excursions in the fields near the house. In all, we only stayed four days in the country, but it was enough, it was like a year, it was the best time of all, though not really. Never really. At any rate. I was feeling rather giddy from my recent course of action, or nonaction, and so was an incredible amount of fun to be around, I was told. I am sometimes given to telling anecdotes when I am in high spirits and in the company of friends, and in the country I told anecdotes left and right. One of them was about a tree house I had loved to jump out of as a boy and the time I landed on my head. Another was about a bone collection I once had, and that I was made, upon its discovery, to soak with oil and to burn. Another was about an old woman I had heard of who lived alone in a house set off in a stand of trees and whom I visited and with whom I took tea. Despite her current appearance, she had told me, wiping a hand across her oily brow, she had been quite a beauty. Tell another, I was told. So I told an anecdote about a car I had owned, and it was an anecdote because I had stolen the car, but I had managed to do it, everyone agreed, quite interestingly. She said to me afterward, after a whole string of anecdotes, I didn’t know, and I said well there is / are more, and she said I hope so, and there was a little more. Things seemed to be progressing. In this vein there were, of course, several things I wished I could have asked her afterward. And still do. But at any rate, at our disposal was an enormous bathtub, of which we all made frequent use. Once, in fact, I walked in at a moment when the tub was being used quite spectacularly. The general effect was of something that might occur unquietly in the branches of a tree. It was almost warm enough at night to have the windows open in the bedroom, but it was also nice that it was cold enough to be able to breathe slowly on the glass and to make a light fog. We loved, also, to close the curtains around the bed. Sometimes, when we were behind the curtains, in the huge dark bed, we could hear John and Deau in the bedroom across the hall, and more than once it seemed clear that they could hear us. During the day, the four of us or the two of us would go walking through the olive groves. The trees smelled of something we all recognized, but couldn’t name. A soft wind blew. I have always been partial to soft winds. At one time, in fact, I entertained dreams of becoming the captain of a hot air balloon. I have still never been up in a hot air balloon, although I see them once in a while — off in the distance, drifting silently. Once, as we were walking along through the olive groves, through a soft wind, I walked with Deau. Deau was very happy. I am creating my itinerary, she said. In consultation with John, of course. He has made some dazzling recommendations. It is nice now to have finally started. It gives you this wonderful in-the-middle feeling, like you’ve left behind your beginning and you haven’t yet reached your end. I asked her how she would know she had reached her end. She said she didn’t know, hadn’t quite thought it through yet, but it was wonderful to feel so intransitive and yet so transitive, simultaneously. And I remember finding it strange but pleasing that she had used those words, and I remarked on this both to her and to John. Yeah, well, if you want to talk about strange, said John. What do you mean? I said. Words and objects, he said. And shelves, I said, don’t forget the shelves, you haven’t seen them all yet. I haven’t seen any of them yet. Well, you will. He did. He didn’t like the shelves. In fact he stood in the center of the room and said, ouch! but that was later. In the afternoons and evenings we walked among the olive trees. There were low stone walls and twisting paths and a blue sky behind the waving branches. Deau told us that she was a sun worshiper. That she belonged to some organization or other and had to pay dues. Every year, she said, each member was required to allow him / herself to be seriously burned by the sun. I found this quite funny, and generally, found her, Deau I mean, quite funny and nice, and certainly more than just a little pleasant to look at, so I don’t know why I snapped at her later. I will likely chalk it up to my nervousness, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Perhaps there was a hint, in my mind, of something sinister about her. Perhaps it was because there was no hint of something sinister about her, ever, and yet she was. Perhaps I did not like her. Perhaps I am a crumb. I am a crumb. But no real matter, and after all I did apologize. Sometimes on our walks we stopped for a picnic. We ate fresh apples and fresh cheeses and fresh meats and fresh breads, just like you are supposed to do in the country. More than once as we did those things I wondered why they did not come. Why no one came. Surely they would come. Wasn’t that, after all, what they did when someone fucked up? At any rate, at one of those picnics we had the idea that each of us should tell a story. To get things started, Deau told a story about a murder case involving a young woman who had been killed quite unpleasantly in the presence of the only witness, a small girl. There were several suspects, and a couple of what John appreciatively called back-foldings, and at the end of it we learned that the case had gone unsolved, as only the small girl had no alibi, beyond the fact of her size, which, we all agreed, surely exonerated her. There were many nice details in Deau’s telling of the story, one of which was that the young girl in question was known to have been in possession of a fine, red-maned rocking horse, and that, according to a relative’s testimony, she had been in the habit of riding it, at times, for hours, and that more than once she had been found to have ridden herself to sleep, and in fact was found, when the postmurder finding was done, in the saddle; covered with blood as she was, she, too, had initially been taken for dead. John then told a story about something the two of us had once done together, is the way he put it. I told a story about an old farmer living alone in the country who had dark, funny dreams and wished one day to be the pilot of a dirigible and to dock at the top of the tallest building in the world and would have accomplished it, except that by the time he arrived, the building was no longer the tallest. Then it was her turn. Taking John and Deau’s intervention as her lead, i.e., proposing to relate a factual account, she told a story about a house in which she had once lived and a man she had once seriously contemplated killing. When she was finished, no one said anything. Deau was smiling, John was not smiling, and I was not smiling and had a hot mouthful of dry cheese. So did you, in fact, end up killing him? I finally asked when I had gotten most of the cheese down. No, she said. He didn’t look like he’d get up anytime soon so I left. Was that true? I asked her that night as we lay in bed. Absolutely, she said. Which parts were true? Most of them. How about the part where you closed the door on his head? Let’s not get back into it right now. Fair enough. Okay, yeah, good one, better than your pal there with his farmer moo, baa, or whatever, said John when she had finished telling her story, which caused me to jump on him and start punching his arm. When I was done we moved on to talking about heroes — improbable things, heroes — and then about some guy who John said he’d once known. This, although he didn’t say it, was sort of a follow-up, or appendage if you like, to the story he’d told earlier about that thing we’d supposedly done together. Real hero, said John. I used to work for him. His daughter got bumped off in some bad deal, looked like an inside job. He did eight of his organic assets personally until he thought he’d found out who had done it, and in the meantime he had all twenty-six of us others at the ceremony even though they didn’t have anything even approximating his daughter to put into the hole. We were all in black tie and he was in black tie and black hat and we stood in the rain and just fucking stood there. He liked model trains, I said. Who killed his daughter? said Deau. And then we kept on talking about heroes for a while. Later I asked her what she thought about heroes, and she said, nothing, and I said, no, really, and she said, sometimes when you look at some people you just want to cry. The next morning it was fine and bright again and I found myself walking along a little stretch of road with Deau. Let’s talk about her, said Deau. All right, I said. She really is wonderful, isn’t she, said Deau. I said yes I thought she really was. She is eccentric and wonderful and so funny. Yes, I agreed. For example, that story she told was so wonderfully over-the-top, said Deau. How do you mean? I mean she was lying about all of it. Ah, I said. Hah, said Deau, and by the way, your friend John is a tremendous fuck. This was exactly what she said. Yes, I said, yes I had heard once or twice before, though not put that way, that he was. And you saw him in action, saw us in action, in the bathroom, she said. I agreed that I had. Did you like what you saw? I’d rather not answer. Are you a tremendous fuck? Hardly. I bet you are. I bet I’m not. Take a look at these, she said, lifting her shirt. I will not. But I did. Did you and John really do that thing together? she continued, a little later, rather smugly. Did you, I answered, ever ride yourself to sleep on a red-maned rocking horse? I didn’t do it, she said, I was far too young. I didn’t say you did, I said. Then she smiled, not pleasantly, and, very slowly, repeated her question. Yes, we did, I said, also very slowly, and although I am not generally in favor of such elocutions, I very slowly added the words “you” and “big fat bitch” to my sentence, and, once she had slapped me, that was the end of that walk. For a moment, then, just for a moment, I found myself thinking again of the city, and of its river and bridges and trees. And also of the floor of my apartment. And of the ceiling. And of the small unsuccessful clouds. And even of the mushy papers for the washer / dryer. Just for a moment, though longingly. When I got back to our room with so many nice objects in it, she, and I am not referring to Deau, had her hand