"She seemed sure enough."
Ernest lit a cigarette, puffed some smoke, stared at him, but then looked back at the road. "Message delivered - duty done. I've made one crucial advancement in defusing the larger problem of returning here."
He drove roughly but not unhappily the rest of the way home.
*
The next day Mr. White and Otto went into the west end of the house and opened a door into a long-unused room. It was dusty and dark. Otto parted the gray curtains so that the air lit with dust motes. The room was spartan - one small desk against an empty wall, with two walls of shelves loaded with farm implement catalogs, give-away almanacs and county extension tomes.
"Let's get some air in here," White said. "This used to be my father’s study."
Otto struggled at a window until he finally hoisted it with a loud cracking noise that made him think he had broken it. He repeated the process on the other window and then a slight breeze began to stir. Mr. White set a book on top of some old papers to hold them down. Then he turned to Otto.
"We’ll have to clear this place out, clean it up, and put a real desk in here. Then it will do well enough for my research."
Over the next several days Otto got the room in order, and then Mr. White sealed himself inside it to make a run at his scholarly project. He sat walled in by box after box of his monographs-in-progress and his codices of ancient tongues. After an initial burst of energy, however, he found himself mostly staring out the window, and when an embossed invitation from the Ladies' Guild arrived in the mail, he practically leapt at the opportunity to give a talk on the designated topic: "Many Races, Many Places, Many Faces." He spent days cribbing notes for his speech. He stomped up and down the hall practicing the cadence of his delivery, its fervor, its candor and emotion. But when the event actually arrived and he had delivered his oration ("Key Indicators of an Indo-European Ur-Kultur and the Potential for Revitalization of a Dignifying World View in a Post-Industrial Millennium"), the only reaction was a smattering of polite applause followed by the clattering of forks on cake plates and then complete and utter silence.
"So you see," he said, "the idea of charity, which heretofore had been a goal only, or worse, a maxim inducing obedience through guilt, will, through our advancements in science and economic prosperity, guided by new revelations of social interaction via the World Spirit, of which democracy has been but the first, faint foreshadowing of true Emancipation, will become, in fact, a reality, a new age of peace, leisure, and a consequentially greatly expanded time for altruistic introspection and Self-discovery."
Silence.
"I’m sure you’re right," an old lady said.
"My but that’s a handsome tie."
"Did you bring any pictures?" asked a woman hopefully. "Or maybe some slides?"
"Of what?" he asked. "Of Nirvana?"
"Oh yes - or of the Eiffel tower. Of anything." Her jolly visage glowed hopefully.
"Or pictures of India, or the Himalayas, or Egypt?" a timid bird chimed in.
"I’m sorry no - no pictures, no slides."
They groaned, but only softly, because they had been raised to be polite.
He sat puzzled and fuming while they finished their punch and cake. Finally he heard his own voice squeak, "I did meet Hemingway once."
Several sets of octogenarian eyes suddenly sparked to fiery life. "Yes? And..?"
"He was a classless drunk. A cad to the ladies. And yes... a bastard."
They gasped and were shocked - such strong language! - but could not wait to hear more. So he spoon fed them gossip about the world’s most famous bearded self-promoter, his love life, his vices, his charades and secret contempts - and they ate it all up. They loved it, but he hated himself with every sentence, and with some effort he finally extricated himself and bid them good afternoon.
All the way home he felt the sting of shame for sinking to their level, for going the easy route of gossip, and he sent himself back to his study more determined than ever to wrest even one inspired idea from his papers and the brown walls and the solitude. Deep down he knew he had needed to come back here to unclutter his mind, to unpack the turmoil and the convolution that had accumulated during his long years in Europe. Almost too late had he realized the debilitating gloomy pressure that Europe had been imposing upon his mind, the need to trivialize the novel and aggrandize the trivial, the need to be pedigreed and bored. He must shake it all off.
And so he sat and worked and tried, but he knew that too much hurrying of the process would only wind his psyche tighter. And so he waited. He tilled. He hummed. He learned to whittle. He tried 1000 things to distract himself enough to let his brain sneak up on him with one inspired idea that would cut loose the logjam of his creativity.
One afternoon he suddenly got an idea of something to write - an aphorism - a thought for his book of important thoughts - but discovered he was out of ink. He went around the house and found three bottles, all dry. He shouted for Otto but then remembered he had sent him to the County Extension office, and that meant the car was gone, too. So he decided he would walk in to town and get some ink himself. He walked out the porch and pulled the straps of his red suspenders back onto his shoulders and paused to smooth the hair he had been harrying all day. He set off on the road to town, repeating the saying over and over lest he forget it by the time he purchased the ink:
"Habit is the watchdog of the Sacred. Train it young."
"Habit is the watchdog of the Sacred. Train it young."
But soon he found himself thinking about dogs, including a big shambling sheepdog he had befriended for three days as a boy before it ran off mysteriously into the hills forever, and so by the time he got to town the aphorism was somewhat garbled in his mind, at best. He entered town and made his way to the few blocks of the businesses. It was late afternoon and people were heading home for the day. They passed him on the road, and some nodded and tipped their hats and some did not. Yellow and pink light spread out ahead of him. He rounded a corner and walked to the print store.
The doorbell jingled as he walked into the dark shop. He saw a man working in the depths of the store behind the counter so he coughed a little then announced, "I need some ink, please."
A lanky, slim-faced man in a smudgy white smock and a green eye shade turned and squinted at him until a look of recognition lit his face. He was the son of the lanky, lean-faced man who had run the shop when White was a boy. The fellow came forward, wiping his hands on his smock and smiling. "Oh, Mr. White, we have those cards you requested."
He had forgotten all about them.
The man reached to the shelves behind the counter and picked up a small box. "Flown in from New York like you asked." He opened the box and handed Mr. White one of the cards. White held it at arm's length and examined it:
Mr. Ernest L. White
philanthropist, theosophist, expeditionary
~ mental traveler ~
He turned it in his hands, bent and bowed it, ran his thumb over the embossed blue letters. It looked rather fine.
"How many boxes did I order?"
"Ten dozen."
"Well, that should be enough. Can you have them delivered?"
"Certainly."
White paid him, took his ink and one small box of the cards, and walked back out into the remainder of the day, but not before writing what remained of his aphorism on the back of one of the cards and sketching a picture of a sheepdog.
As he put the store behind him he faced the aspect of a nearly-empty Main Street at dusk. Here and there a motor hummed or hooves clopped, then faded again. Mothers' distant voices called their children to supper. He looked up and down the wide street at the few tall storefronts and then crossed the green square in the middle of town to get to the post office before it closed. It was hot and dingy and brown inside, with dustmotes adding to the stultifying sensation. A gaunt man in a striped blue shirt gave him some letters then also reached into a pigeon-hole and extracte
d a long mailing tube. White took it from his hands and knew instantly what it was – the preliminary sketches he'd commissioned for the museum while in New York had arrived.
He felt a thrill of excitement. He walked over to a table and opened the tube and shook out its rolled documents. These he spread out quickly, one upon the other. His eyes traced their blue lines lovingly. These represented the first real stab at his big idea, its first intersection with reality. His idea, which he had arrived upon in the last few years, was this: he would build a museum of the history of Mankind in the World (Menschheit in der Welt as he liked to call it because things sounded more important in German), and he would build it here, in the former Indian Territories, to commemorate this as the place where the myth of the ultima thule had finally petered out and the Western appetite had turned back upon itself to pick among the scraps it had hurried past in its march to the Pacific, to search for clues to its Identity in mental geography rather than physical space, to gobble up what it has discarded and then eye its other cast-offs hungrily. It would be a history of the world to rival Orwell's, writ with pot shards and totems and weapons and tools and utensils and more - the older and dirtier the better. The exhibits would be arranged in concentric wheel-like shapes that were navigable in infinitely unique ways, according to the visitor's whim. There would be a hundred entrances to the museum, but only one exit. Each artifact would be accompanied by an explanatory block of text; each block of text would have an accompanying poem; the museum visitor would be able to compose his or her own grand epic poem about the history of the Western world depending on the way he chose to navigate the museum and punched out the corresponding holes in the guide book. There would be visitors' remembrance books for sale in the lobby into which the blocks of poems could be printed and configured. Each one would be a masterpiece. He would sign as many as he could. It would take at least ten years to build; he would have to call in all his collected treasures from around the world and have them packed in by plane, by crate, by mule, by boat.
As White hunched over his plans and pondered them, he felt a sudden fear that the idea was turning to ash even as his mind examined it. He rolled the documents back up quickly and stuffed them in the tube. He reminded himself that a mind mustn't touch the highest ideas lightly, lest they lose their savor in familiarity and idle introspection.
He had walked half way back to his house when there came a half-hearted clap of thunder and a light rain began to fall. He ducked beneath a grove of trees along the side of road and immediately thought he saw someone deeper within them.
"You brought the band in for her, not for me."
He felt a bright shudder go through him. The figure he saw, in the trees or in his mind, was young and lithe like a deer.
"Hello!" he said.
But he did not see her anymore, though all the rest of the way home he felt like he was being watched.
Chapter 3
One whole side of town, which had formerly been farmland, was now lined with row after row of hastily-constructed houses, cheap flat shacks to hold the many workers who would help scrape the land and build the dam and flood the valley for the highly-touted lake. And alongside the road into town was a sign in hues of sun-bleached teal and orange announcing the lake itself and reading "Welcome to Progress, Future Home of the World’s Largest Multi-Arch Dam!" And in the foreground images of ideal families hugged the shoreline of the lake, picnicking, fishing, and boating on its too-blue waters, while in the background was a second image of a family in their living room enjoying the dam’s Promethean gift of electricity - Dad reading the paper by lamp light and the family listening to the radio (save for mother, who was busy cooking dinner with about 14 electrical appliances). And in the lower right corner of the sign were the names of every politician connected with approving the project or funding the project or overseeing the project or in some other way interested in re-election.
Otto found himself driving through this part of town to settle in gentlemanly fashion a rather ungentlemanly breach of agreement between the men who erected this housing and White’s mother’s estate. White’s mother had actually owned the land that had undergone this sudden, bleak conversion, but she had sold it to men only because they had misrepresented their intentions – they had promised the old lady their goal was to erect an Indian Mission and an orphanage.
And so Otto parked outside of one shack one notch nicer than the rest and walked up to meet with two men who were dressed one notch more nicely than the rest and who smiled the sort of oily smile that said they knew what they had done was unethical but also that they stood tentatively protected inside one traced loop of the law.
Otto nodded to them and they all walked into the office and left the door open because it was a warm day and the room was small enough as it was. Some legal documents had been prepared in advance and rested on a table in the middle of the room, and the three men hovered around these and Otto bent down to scrutinize them while the two oily men made small talk about the weather and how nice it was to have Mr. White back. Otto mumbled nothings in reply and looked carefully over the papers that waived White’s claim to injury in exchange for an agreement to sell him back the land, at a fixed price that was too generous, when the dam construction was complete.
As his eyes scanned the lines, Otto heard a small crowd of the workmen conversing outside. They had gathered at the appearance of his fancy car and had reckoned who he represented. Their talk turned to his newly-returned employer:
"So how’d he get so rich? I suppose it’s oil money, isn’t it?"
"Oil, sure – he owns oil now – but the money comes from something his uncle invented years ago – some part that makes every last engine that comes out of Detroit run like clockwork. And by "uncle" I mean his natural born father – that’s right – this fellow’s real dad died when he was young and left his sour old brother and his wife a ton of money and the job of raising his son. The woman was as good as gold but his "father" – that man always had some bitterness in him. No wonder that when he came of age the boy grabbed his inheritance and left as soon as he could."
Otto found himself signing the papers a little more forcefully than he’d intended. The other men smiled and Otto turned and left the shack quickly. The crowd gave way a little to let him through, and as he climbed back into his car he could not help but think he had overheard one of the more accurate and succinct biographies of his employer uttered on either side of the Atlantic in recent years. He was glad to slip the car into gear and leave.
When he arrived back at White’s tilting gray house and announced the results of the meeting, White waved him off perfunctorily. He sat cold and stony in his chair. Soon after acquiring the tube with plans for the museum, his mental block had returned with an absolutely oppressive paralysis. All curiosities lost their savor. He had tried to exorcize it by chopping wood, doing calisthenics, and blasting tree stumps with dynamite. But none of it worked.
As Otto walked in he handed White a note. "Here is something I was given for you in town. Perhaps this will cheer you up."
"What is it?"
"The local branch of the state college has invited you to help them with a production of ‘Prometheus Fit to Be Tied.’"
"Patronizing – they just want my money."
"Probably, but at least look at it."
White scowled and read the message. "Prometheus" was a verse drama he had written in the 1920's when he was living in New York. He had performed it to the critical acclaim of off-Broadway bohemians. It had all been high-toned posturing and crap, but he was still secretly proud of it.
"I am given to understand," Otto continued, "that they have been studying the play for drama class. They'd be honored if you'd attend or participate."
White looked up at him and crumpled the paper. "No," he said. "Flat out no." He stalked off into another room.
But later, after supper, with his belly full of a red wine and a steak Otto had prepared particularly well, he found h
imself in a more expansive mood. The mental block lifted itself off his brain one tiny bit. He poured himself a tall drink, sat in his favorite leather chair and thumbed through an antique atlas. "What the hell," he called to Otto. "Tell them I'll do it."
The days passed and Mr. White took to visiting the college and the small drama department, and he took on more authority in the production than the class had intended. He liked the job the students had done on the set. They had obviously studied the cover of the original program for the play. It had been rendered in shades of cobalt blue and orange, all Bauhaus and industrial and stylized. It showed a menacing sky and a jag of earth in the lower right and a man all aglow like a rural electric co-op's mascot with legs like lightning and one arm outstretched holding a tongue of fire. It was full of foreboding and vague prescience, and as such was fine.
On the day of the play Ernest's eyes lifted from the program and appraised the old college gym which was to be their auditorium. It was dim and echoey and smelled of sweat and disinfectant and sports balm. A medicine ball lay in the far corner. The air was filled with the creaking and clanking of metal chairs being set up.
"You're so brave to offer to do this, in spite of the controversy," said the drama teacher, an old lady with a bohemian cast and blinky eyes behind thick glasses.
"Controversy?" Otto asked.
"Well, a small group of religious folks find the general humanistic theme, and its execution, distasteful." Then her eyes flashed big and she laughed. "But I say bully! I once worked with Isadora Duncan!"
Mr. White stood calm with his chin lifted. "Bully indeed. I’m going to need a little something to get through this." He excused himself and went through the back door of the gym for a smoke and a swig from his flask.
A scant hour later he sat in the first row of chairs and watched as the play's toga-wearing protagonist swung from wires above a small mob of protestors.
"Blasphemer!" someone shouted, but the earnest freckled thespian that had been cast in the lead defiantly shouted out his lines for all the extra credit they were worth:
PROMETHEUS:
"I've succeeded though the gods bedevil me!
My genius begs gods' jealousy!