Fiction Attic

June 10, 2006 What a handsome wee chap! Oscar looks exactly like you–is Kevin pissed? (Janet’s kind of ticked off that neither of the kids look much like her. Thomas started off looking like me but has gone on to find his own face, and Rona favors me more than Janet too.)

No doubt about it, raising kids is awful. It’s embarrassing to have people over (people who don’t have kids anyway, or who don’t know my kids), because Thomas never, ever shuts up and crawls all over anybody. The more you scold him the more amped up he gets. He crawled into bed with us about 5:15 this morning and peed. But last night he read almost verbatim a whole Thomas the Tank Engine book to us. It wasn’t a See-Dick-Run type, either–it was a real story, about thirty pages long with lots of dialogue and lots of characters. He didn’t really read it, of course, but he had memorized it from us reading it to him just this week (it’s a library book so he did it within the last few days.) He has an amazing memory. If I try to do any condensing while reading a story I’ve read to him before (like the 100 page Disney version of 101 Dalmations), he corrects me. I can’t even leave out a “he said.” I wish there was some kind of contest I could enter him in, or something he could make money at in Vegas. But I don’t think I could stay at home with him all day the way Janet does. No wonder she’s always in a bad mood. I think when he really learns to read he’ll calm down a lot, but it will also ruin his life. Better him than us.

You haven’t heard Richard Thompson? I’d think Kevin would be a big fan. He’s been around since the sixties and is one of the most amazing guitarists and songwriters ever. I’m a fanatic. He’s an English guy who started out as a kid with some Celtic folk group called Fairport Convention and then split off and recorded with his wife Linda Thompson through the seventies and early eighties. Their album “Shoot Out the Lights” is on most every top-whatever great albums of all time lists. He’s certainly on my top five list of all time saddest songs with “Beeswing.” See if you can download or upload or i-pod or whatever you do with songs and the internet. It’s about a wild woman the singer falls in love with (”She was a fine thing/Fine as a beeswing/So fine a breath of air might blow her away/She was a lost child/She was runnin’ wild/She said as long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay.) It will break your heart, especially the end:

 Last I heard she was sleepin' rough
 Down on the Darby beat
 White Horse in her hip pocket
 A wolf hound at her feet
 And they say her flower has faded
 Hard living and hard booze
 But I guess that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse
 And they say she even married once
 A man named Romney Brown
 But even a gypsy caravan was too much settlin' down

Also listen to a song he does with his son called “Persuasion.” It’s the most beautiful melody I’ve ever heard. I could go on for pages about Richard Tompson. His most famous song, which you probably have heard, is called “Vincent Black Lightning.” It’s a love song about a woman and a bank robber and his motorcycle–very cool and very spooky. The guitar is unbelievable–it’s only Richard Thompson but it sounds like three guitars. Best place to start with him is an a sort of best-of album called “Action-Packed.” If I could figure out how to burn a CD I’d make a copy for you– maybe I’ll try. He also does a bad-ass acoustic version of “Oops, I Did it Again,” but that’s on a different album.

For my birthday we went to the bookstore. I got Edward P. Jones’s short stories, “Lost in the City,” because everything else I’ve read by him has blown me away. I also bought Ethan Canin’s “Carry Me Across the Water” because it was marked down to $2.49 in hardback. I got James Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime,” one of those books writers are always talking about but that I’d never read. I started reading it last night and am about halfway through it–it’s only about 190 pages. You’d love it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s very sexy. Janet got me a couple of books for my birthday through Amazon: “Ain’t Got No Cigarettes,” which is a collection of a bunch of conversations with various Nashville people about Roger Miller (”King of the Road” guy), who must have been the funniest person who ever lived. (I’m going to start using one of his lines. Whenever the telephone would ring he’d say, “Get that. It might be the phone.” I don’t know why but that just cracks me up. When people would avoid picking up the check at a restaurant he’d say they had “shellout falter.”) She also got me “The Tao of Willie,” which is a pretty embarrassing book, and I’m the world’s biggest Willie Nelson fan.

Love, Wade

June 6, 2006 Fussy, I still want to get up there to see you and the boys but blah, blah, blah. The summer keeps filling up with weddings and trips to Scotland and baby showers and crap like that. Maybe in September? I am an idiot in that I cussed out my credit card company a few years ago when I found out everybody else gets air miles and I’d had the same credit card since 1989 and they’d never given me squat. So they started giving me airmiles for $75 a year, and they’re on American Airlines, which means of course that they’re useless if you have two kids, since every flight has to go through Dallas. Things that are so easy and natural for other people are the things I suck worst at. Janet’s no good at those things either, but she’s got an excuse since she’s foreign. Anyway, I got something like 100,000 air miles that I need to find a way to burn.

Below are some pictures of my kids. My little girl is so mean. Thomas was always a conniver, deal-maker, negotiator, wheedler–he manipulates you in a way to try to make you believe you’re winning when really he’s getting everything on his list. Rona simply amps up from zero to sixty when she doesn’t get her way. She goes from a grumble to a screech. She doesn’t cry, usually–she just screeches when she’s pissed off, and she gets pissed off a lot. Thomas and I call her Little Grumbly Granny or the Screech Owl. He’s very sweet to her, and she adores him–they gang up on me and Janet all the time Check out the last two pictures–he’s showing her how to write letters. Very sweet. Wish he’d show me.

I keep up with you through your blog. I wish we had a Mongolian baby-sitter. We’re getting a sitter tonight, one of maybe eight or nine times we’ve had a sitter in the past four years. It’s my birthday (happy birthday to me, etc.), so we’re going to go do something, probably to the mall, where Janet will clothes shop and I’ll screw around in the book store or record store until she’s finished. It’s amazing how un-eclectic my tastes are, and they’re getting narrower all the time. I used to listen to both kinds of music, country and western (favorite Blues Brothers reference of my undergraduate years). Now I don’t listen to anything but Richard Thompson. I’m a Richard Thompson fanatic. Luckily he puts out a record every eleven or twelve minutes so I have plenty of new stuff to listen to. He sells stuff only through his website now, and stuff goes out of print after a week or two, so you have to act fast. I’ll go to the record store anyway and look at their Richard Thompson CD’s, if they have any. If they don’t I’ll go to the book store and see if they have a copy of The Moviegoer, because that’s the only book I read now (not counting your books, of course.)

That’s not entirely true. I found a tape Kevin made for me ten years ago–Graham Parker on one side and Steve Forbert on the other. It still works! I used to listen to the Graham Parker all the time but assumed I’d lost the tape, and I was very excited when I found it, and now Thomas’s favorite song is “Short Memories,” which is also my favorite song on that tape. We especially like the way he says “shovelin’ coal” in the verse that goes “My daddy fought in Mycacea/Egypt and North Korea/He came home to a good career/Shovelin’ coal!” Thomas makes me sing that part over and over again and cracks up every time.

Write me back!

Love, Wade

Read the Wade Williams archive here.

I’ll settle for the color of skin. Skin is the color of his skin, which is my skin, and one day while running my skin gets cold, cells pass away, and I almost lose my feet. It’s winter in Chittenango and he wears a beard. This is before the divorce. I love my one-year-old sister Evelyn who is three years younger than I am. She’s at daycare, my mother is at work, and my father watches the house. James Leon, my father, is supposed to be watching the house but we’re stretching our legs on the porch. I wear shorts, a sweatshirt, and a knit cap, and my socks are pulled up to my knees. My sneakers are laced tighter than ice-skates and I don’t really want to do this. The snow will cover our tractor soon. Wind batters our plastic porch windows.

“Are you ready?” he says. “You’re ready.”

James Leon is a runner. He has run the Boston Marathon three times and the New York City twice. He has given up competitive running, he says, to help my mother raise the family. But he’s made a quiet agreement with himself. He’ll run twelve miles every day and he’ll bring me along for part of it. His body, as he likes to say, is a well-conditioned rock.

With a grunt he pushes the porch door open, and one of the aluminum panels blows in with a windy pop. I follow him outside. My sweatshirt is a sieve, and since I haven’t an ounce of fat on my frame, the wind scoops heat from my belly and my back. I take a couple of jumps.

“Here, put these on your hands,” he says, and he rolls thick grey socks over the knuckles of my fingers. He wants to keep them warm. The wool is itchy and cold, so I make fists as he pulls the hem of each sock up to the elbow, He snaps rubber bands around my arms to hold the socks in place.

“Is that good?” he says. “It’s good.”

James Leon claps his hands. I jump, because I’m a good soldier. He wants to warm up for the run. He bounces too, and the cold gravel driveway crunches under our feet. We curve off the end of the driveway, out to the open road, and he directs me to a lane of dirt that covers the narrow shoulder. We run slowly, as we always do, and he and I keep pace. My cheeks feel raw and scraped already. Ice crystals glint from the pavement.

We run past barns and wide fields and past the old missile silo near the Gaveston Yard. For those of us who have inherited our politics rather than arrived at them, who mentally lay dynamite at the California borders to float us out to sea, who have forgotten Clinton’s Rwanda, who never bother with Bayview or Hunter’s Point let alone strike out for New England, or for a southern state, who grow up here, settle here, because we know we hit the jackpot, who watch others come and go as we calmly assume a shape, who fear and detest the Ivy League but can’t name the schools that compose it, New England is studded with missile silos. They are hidden in random fields. They are hidden all over the country, and one day a few years after the divorce my third grade math teacher will assign a project based on proportions. We’ll live in another house, in another town, and I’ll choose my bedroom for a model. I’ll lay astro-turf in a cardboard box, and then add a dresser and a bed. I’ll paint a mirror on the wall and then I’ll draft some falsified plans. I’m not impressed with this work, and it’s worse when I show up for class, because my friend Favvy will be standing next to her beautiful rendition of a missile silo. It will be three feet tall, with windows and wheels, and entirely in proportion. Her picture will appear in the Adirondack Daily, and we’ll both receive grades of one hundred.

James Leon checks in with me now and then, but as the strong wind pushes us along the road, I rarely give honest answers. He has drawn my shoelaces far too tight. My feet are cold and pinched. He looks fine, and as he trots like a Clydesdale with bumpers on his feet, steam shoots out of his mouth. He breaks into a slick sweat, and he rolls his hat up over his ears.

My face feels bitten by wind as I run, and by sand thrown up from the road. I’m losing feeling in my feet. It hasn’t been this cold on our previous runs, and we won’t run together again. In a few weeks my mother, carrying Evelyn in her arms, will move us out of our house.

“You’re warm enough?” he says. “You can make it to the pole?”

The utility pole is my turn-around point. It is .51 miles from our house. My father, who is always taking the measure of things, has driven the distance out in his truck, and pegged it with the odometer. I sat in the passenger’s seat as he drove, watching the moon follow us through the window.

“You can you make it to the pole,” he decides.

I wonder if I can. My feet no longer belong to me, and I sort of flap them with my shins. Flap, flap. I watch them hit the road. Flap…and onward with the pattern until, to my surprise, the rusty rims of the transformer pot hang above our heads. Electrical jumpers quiver and hum as my father runs in place.

“Okay,” he says. “Go around it.”

I swing around the pole with my sock-fist, twice, because this is our tradition. I tug the sock free when it snags.

“You remember what to do?” he says. “Run on the side of the road. Look for our yellow house.”

He claps his hands together, and I flap off down the road.

“Now, home!” he calls out after me.

James Leon has found himself caught between two conflicting agreements; the agreement he has made with himself – to train - and an agreement he has made with my Mother.

I flap with high knees and a straight back because there’s a chance he might be watching. There’s a chance he isn’t watching, too, so I turn around to see. He’s running. His legs are fluid and they appear relaxed. He’s hit his natural stride. He removes his hat and holds it with his hand and oh my Lord I’m proud. His feet snap comfortably back to the road after each smooth reach of his legs. He disappears at a point along the horizon, and I linger for a while, until it’s clear there’s nobody there. With the toe of his sock I cover my neck. I bend my head against the wind.

I daydream.

I look at my feet.

The road just looks the same.

I begin to walk to the house, but the wind skates through my body and threatens to blow me off the road. In truth I feel unbalanced. My feet are numb, and if I tilt into one of these uncut fields I’m certain that I’ll be lost. Then, as if thinking about being lost has made me - not lost, but clumsy - I trip and skin my knee.

I roll onto my butt and I take off my hat.

With blood on my knee, I daydream.

There is a considerable body of evidence that points to the emotional and social benefits that accrue to resilient children. What are the characteristics of a resilient child, and how can we identify vulnerable children? Barbara T. Bowman will present a practical and engaging session in which she will consider strategies adults can use to promote resiliency in children. You will leave empowered with new ideas for enhancing coping and negotiation skills that will serve children throughout their lives.

This woman’s leg is attractive.

She pulls her car to the side of the road, opens a blue door, and slips her beautiful leg out. The leg is several cuts above my family’s class and sophistication. When the woman gets out, she looks at me. She looks at the socks that are bound to my hands and I feel a little embarrassed. She looks at my bloody knee.

“Where are you’re parents?” she says.

I don’t want trouble, for me or for my father. I point toward our yellow house.

“You better come with me,” she says.

She helps me up off the side of the road and brings me to her car. She wraps a blanket around me. The car is plush and warm, like the woman’s soft blue coat, and it smells like a pile of rum cookies. I shiver as she drives. When we reach the yellow house, she pulls into the driveway, and she puts the car in park. She sits for a moment, letting her wide brown eyes rest on me. She smiles. There is concern in this smile, and apprehension, and a brisk intelligence in her eyes, and even, it seems to me, a sexual consideration. She understands something of my past, and of my future.

“You might be okay,” she says.

She is who I want to be.

Her smile fades as she touches my hand, and then she opens the door. She leaves me in the car with her blanket, and her face assumes a curious expression as she walks up to our house. She knocks on the door, waits a moment, and then she tries the handle. The door of course swings open. She gathers me up like a puppy in a blanket and carries me into the living room. She sets me down on the couch.

“I can’t believe these socks,” she says.

She removes the rubber bands from my elbows and unrolls the socks from my hands. In our bathroom, the woman finds a sponge that my mother uses to remove make-up from her face. The woman cleans my cuts.

“Your lips are blue,” she says.

If I weren’t so cold, I’d blush.

“Which direction did he run in?” she says. “Try to remember for me.”

I point in a direction.

“Okay,” she says, and she takes a deep breath. Leaving me in alone in my house seems hard for her to do.

“I’m going to leave, but I’ll be back soon,” she says. “Are you thirsty?”

“No.”

“Keep this blanket tight around you. Stay there on the couch.”

She touches my face and Lord her hand is warm. I don’t want her to take it away. She leaves me wrapped in her blanket, though, and after she closes the door I think about locking it. I wish there were a way to warn my father that this woman is out there on the road, looking for him. I sense there might be trouble.

I want to get these sneakers off, but the laces are stiffly knotted. My fingers make ticking sounds as they slip against the knots.

It’s all a game of waiting. You wait for school to start, and you wait for school to end. You wait for summer. You wait for lunch, and when a sandwich is served you don’t really want to eat it. You wait for leaves to fall from the trees, and you rake them into piles. You cover yourself with them.

I should give up on the woman.

Instead, I’ll wait for James Leon to come in from his run. I’ll wait with Deacon, our boa constrictor.

Deacon and I are the same age and we both eat once a month. That’s my mother’s joke. Our family is a robust and healthy family, as you can see, but I happen to be an exception. I’m a picky eater. I want to eat; that is, I want to want to eat. But I have no appetite for it. Now and then my appetite comes and I eat and eat and eat.

I ate eleven pancakes for breakfast once and my mother beamed. She beamed so brightly that I made a big display of it, counting out the pancakes as I swallowed them down, and eating while my appetite was good.

Deacon? I’m freezing.

Let’s look at each other’s tongues.

James Leon has arrived, and he doesn’t look cold. In fact, he seems to be sweating.

The woman doesn’t come inside. She drops him off and leaves. She leaves me with her blanket, though, and with my father, James Leon: a twice-decorated US Marine who can’t untie my shoes. He cuts the laces with a knife.

One at a time he removes each sneaker, and he then removes each sock. As we look at my feet it occurs to me: the Marines haven’t taught him shit. If I was under fire in the living room and there was a bunker in the kitchen he would be very quick to drag me there. His belt would be ready if my foot were a spurting stump. But it isn’t. It’s just cold. Both my feet are cold, and my father James Leon looks worried. I look at him, and he looks at my feet. My feet aren’t looking good. Parts of my left foot - including the ball and two toes - are white and luminescent. The cells of my feet, like stars, are releasing energy as they die. My father and I wonder what he’s going to do, and if he’s smart, he’s making agreements with himself.

James Leon is smart - but he’s smart in peculiar ways.

I wonder if I’m being fair. If I, right now, were to chart a graph of my own life with the y-axis being my level of emotional maturity and the x-axis being time, the result would more closely resemble my high-risk stock, with all of its spikes and slides, than the comfortable hypotenuse of my more stable holdings.

This is true of James Leon, too, and right now he’s in a slide. It isn’t the worst of slides. The worst will come in sixteen weeks, when he will slide lower than most people ever slide. Most people never spend an evening raping their wife, after she’s left him, and then leave her – as he will - with a badly broken jaw. Most people don’t do that. For this reason it will be difficult, years later, for him to find a way to talk about it. It will take courage. One day when I’m fourteen - and all grown up - James Leon and I will sit alone in a car with theater stubs in our hands. He’s nervously enjoying visiting rights, trying to find courage in me.

I’ve done stupid things, he says. I’ll regret them all my life.

It’s okay, I say.

Your mother’s a very strong woman.

This is true. My mother is an interesting woman. My father, who turns a ticket stub in his hand, is making a beginning. He’s laying groundwork for our future, for years when we’re both older, when I’m no longer fourteen, and he’s not thirty-nine. People need someone to call on the phone, when things get tough, or to take care of them, when they get older. He wants me to understand this. James Leon has made an agreement with himself to try to make things right.

Listen, I say. It’s over. For the most part, we’re okay.

This isn’t true. My sister Evelyn, for example, is far from okay. My sister Evelyn, for example, is twenty-six years old and she’s afraid to have sex. She wants to have sex, that is, she wants to want to have sex, but she has no appetite for it. She’s told me this over the phone. She has no appetite for kissing either, or for dating men, or women, which is a strange wrinkle in this narrative, a little tic in logic. I was present for my mother’s rape, and I heard the awful screams. She and I are okay. But Evelyn, who was only a year old when the rape occurred, who was pre-conscious, and technically, not present for the rape, is none-the-less obsessed with it. This rape is all over her life. It’s in the books she reads, and in the movies she watches. It’s in men she finds attractive.

Evelyn has lost her balance. She has intense imagination, and if her mind twirls and her hands reach out, they reach wants for understanding. She says that she wants to live (which is a trend in the right direction) and last year she earned a teaching degree. But teaching isn’t enough for Evelyn; she wants to keep patterns from repeating. She wants to know our history so she can lean against a frame. She told me this over the phone. Since I remember everything, I felt obliged to help. I told her I lay on the couch in the living room and I heard Mom’s screams from the bedroom as I tried to fall asleep.

This wasn’t enough for Evelyn.

“This is my father that we’re talking about, and my mother, and they’re your parents too. You need to do better than that.”

So I told her.

One day Dad lied and he took me on a run during winter in Chittenango and my feet got cold but he saved them. He put water on the stove and I still worry about the water but he rolled up his shirt and put my feet on his belly. His belly got cold and my feet were still cold so he moved my feet up to his chest. His mouth was open. I could hear water boil but dad heard nothing. He looked at my feet which were dead, and Evelyn, I tell you he knew he had killed them. He said please to somebody and it wasn’t to me and he breathed harder than I’d ever heard him run. He moved my feet to his armpits. He kneeled on the floor before the couch and he lay his head down on my knees. He said please please but not to me, and my kneecaps itched under his beard. He had killed them. The water boiled in the kitchen but it must have boiled away because after an hour I no longer heard it, but still I worry about it. Then the feeling came back and yeah the pain was so bad that I screamed. So he saved them.

This wasn’t enough for Evelyn, either.

So I decided to take a trip.

Where there is no great love, there can be no great disappointment.

                                Martin Luther King, Riverside Church, 
                                New York, 1967

Evelyn is smart with money. She owns a small house in Albuquerque. The house stands on a plot of land with a yard surrounded by a short wall of pink cinderblocks that breaks a New Mexican wind. It blows in from the Sandias Mountains. The sky pulses orange and yellow light as she drives me in from the airport, and the cactus shudder in the warm wind as we pull into her driveway. I can only stay for an evening.

“It will remain like this for an hour,” she says, looking up at the sky. “I’ll show you through the yard.”

Her backyard is pretty. Native succulents green the dry sand, and a tall cactus with many arms reaches above the pink wall. The yard isn’t big, but as we walk, Evelyn gives me a short history. She explains how the yard was desert when she first moved in, how she planted things but they died, and so she tried to plant again. A few of them took, she says, and as she shows me the leaf of a bottle tree, we sit down on a swing.

So, she says.

So.

Where do you want to start?

Evelyn, there’s no good place to start.

In that case, just start talking.

Can’t you see I’m trying?

Todd Chapman, an MFA student at San Francisco State University, was raised in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. Todd’s interest in writing began through the works of Roald Dahl, and at age thirteen he wrote a letter to Mr. Dahl soliciting tips on writing. He never received a response.

Photo by Thomas Kearnes. Thomas Kearnes is a freelance visual designer, author and photographer from East Texas. His fiction has appeared in Wicked Hollow, Southern Hum, flashquake, Underground Voices and Blithe House Quarterly. His photography is forthcoming in Tattoo Highway.View artist’s other photos here.

That is not true. Mommy did not call you an asshole.

Mommy does not use that kind of language. Not with her little girl, who Mommy loves with all of her heart.

All right, Mommy might have—in the very distant past—felt so overwhelmed that she called you a “shithead.” She didn’t mean for you to hear that of course. She was speaking to herself, which Mommies are allowed to do when their little girls look them right in the eye and say the kitty ate Mommy’s chocolate. Did you honestly think Mommy would believe we have a kitty?

I know this is hard for you to understand, but Mommy has a Masters Degree. She wrote her thesis on String Theory and made a groundbreaking case that particles of light change in direct proportion to the mass of the waterline at the edge of a pond. Now Mommy can’t tell you where she just put her glasses. Do you see? This is what this life is doing to me. There is simply not enough of Mommy to go around sometimes. She’s like particles of light reflecting off the water. She hasn’t the height, weight, or mass you are perceiving. She appears to be whole but she isn’t. She feels like the world is the mass of the waterline, and Mommy is coming apart at warp speed before her very eyes.

That is why sometimes Mommy has to go into the bathroom and say her name aloud twenty-five times just to be certain she actually exists.

Now, Mommy is going to take a deep breath. See? Would you like to take a deep breath as well? That’s it, honey. But deeper. Should we try it again? Don’t be frightened. Mommy did not call you an asshole when you ignored what she told you to do.

That would be a sign Mommy’s coming apart. Which she’s not. Which she’s totally not. She would if she could, but she can’t. And you know why? Do you want to know why, honey? Because Mommy is your rock.

I was not the only Irishman on the SS Arizona, as we moored outside New York harbor, but I certainly wore the finest ankle-length otter-lined overcoat.

When we were advised that our ship could not dock until the next morning, I remarked to the captain that the Americans would be crestfallen at having to spend another night without their apostle of Aestheticism. He muttered some nautical expression under his breath.

A party of yellow journalists were hungry enough for epigrams that they chartered a launch and came on board to ask me questions, along with medical officers to clear us from quarantine. The journalists wore dreadful hats that reminded me of chimney pots. “I hope my arrival on these shores will be the beginning of a great movement here,” I told them.

Impudent questions followed, such as whether it was true that I had my bathwater colored with triple essence of verbena. I was already making a sensation.

The next day, as we proceeded to our berth in the North River, our ship got stuck in the mud. More journalists came aboard. One wished to know what I thought of the Atlantic. “A disappointment,” I said. “The roaring ocean does not roar.”

WILDE UNIMPRESSED BY ATLANTIC, would be the headline.

My purpose here, I explained, while sailors scrambled in the rigging, and foghorns sounded plangently, was to assert the primacy of Art over life.

“Are you here to beautify America, Mr. Wilde?”

“Beauty is all around us,” I observed, gesturing helpfully. “Man is hungry for beauty. All we want is a systematic way of bringing it out.”

“That grain elevator over there, in Hoboken,” a reporter said, “does even that have aesthetic value?”

Flicking dust off my lavender kid gloves, I responded that I was too near-sighted to perceive the item in question.

Once we landed, my luggage was retrieved from the bowels of the ship before anyone else’s, and I was swept off to the waterfront Customs House, a makeshift shed surrounded by coops of truculent geese. Inside the shed, a grizzled, red-nosed individual inspected my trunks full of lilac Hungarian smoking jackets and pantaloons of fawn-covered velvet. The old man asked me meekly whether my trunks contained any prohibited imports, such as animal hides, obscene materials, or Oriental carpets. Americans are infinitely curious about trivial matters.

“I have nothing to declare but my genius,” I clarified.

The inspector wore a horrific beard and a jacket of an unsightly blue, none too recently washed and studded with brass buttons. “I talked to the captain of the Arizona,” he said, sifting through some first editions of Poems I had brought as gifts for celebrated literati. “He said he should have had ye lashed to the ship’s bowsprit on the windward side.”

On his lapel, my enigmatic interlocutor wore a tin badge bearing a name I suddenly recognized.

He’d attained some notoriety as an author of sea-going yarns, before Victoria’s accession. It came to me I’d even read a book of his once, on a winter’s afternoon in Merrion Square.

This was Herman Melville, author of Typee. Had he really bedded with cannibals? “I thought you were dead,” I exclaimed.

Melville shook his head. “I walk uptown to the docks six days a week,” he said. “I examine ships’ cargoes and passengers’ baggage. They pay me three dollars and sixty cents a day.”

The ennui of such a life! Better by far he’d remained in the South Seas, in a tropical grove with dusky natives.

“They try to get me to take bribes,” he said, shifting back and forth on his feet, scrutinizing my cigars to make sure they had been correctly packaged. “Money is thrust into my pockets behind my back. I always return it.”

Prising open the valise containing my letters of introduction to important American writers, Melville regarded me with an expression so changeful, I felt he was looking through me, at happier vistas from long ago. How had he come to this? Had he failed to cultivate the right people? It was certainly hard to see this spent and sunstruck seafarer as a figure in society, even New York society.

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

“All manner of men are discharged in this port,” Melville told me, “philosophers and footpads, apes and angels, speculators and parlor men.” He fingered my silk leggings with his gnarled hands. “Then beware lest if you go out of your way to be seen, you may also be seen through.”

Was it, by some Puritan tradition, his appointed task to examine not only my luggage but my soul also? The state of a man’s soul is perhaps better revealed by his choice of cravats than of convictions.

I inquired whether anything was amiss. Melville started filling in a form in large block letters. “My concern is with those who carry more than they claim to,” he said, “while you are as yet a ship with an empty hold, blown you know not where. On the surface, a crust of evanescent light,” he murmured. “Below, blackness. Man’s instinct is always to seek the darker realms. Yet what we seek in the depths is what is most likely to destroy us.”

Before we parted, he handed me a long, privately-printed poem about a religious crisis of some description, inscribing it to me, Tell Truth, & shame the Devel. I would like to say that I later read this work, but I was presented with many poems on my travels, eccentrically-spelled verse histories of the Civil War and so forth, and soon acquired the habit of flinging them from the windows of railway carriages to divert the buffalo. For myself, I presented the customs officer with a free copy of my own collection which I inscribed l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, a principle in which I found I had just ceased to place any faith, rather distressingly since it was the underlying premise of my impending lecture tour. But how dull life would be if we never said things we disbelieved.

The gesture with which Melville bade me farewell made him seem almost phantasmal, so that I left the shed with a superstitious feeling of horror, as if I’d glimpsed my own reflection in a dream-mirror. This man had witnessed mutinies and shipwrecks, but perhaps nothing more terrible than the general indifference that now confronted him.

Outside the customs shed, rats made forays among heaps of refuse. The retired Colonel who was managing my tour handed me some lillies and ushered me into a buggy, my portmanteaux were loaded onto other vehicles, and as we traversed the Manhattan streets, our weary horse up to its fetlocks in mud, a pack of quite charming urchins fell in behind us, chasing us past jobbers’ warehouses, imitating what they supposed to be my gait and laughing adorably. Vagabonds washed themselves at hydrants. I placed a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it.

That year I would traverse vast immensities to visit such exquisite places as New Orleans and San Francisco and transform them forever, by teaching their inhabitants that it is through means of the most evanescent things — art, conversation, fashion, reputation – that we may best perceive the eternal and the essential. Yet for now my colloquy with the ancient customs inspector had left me feeling out of sorts. Could it be that whoever drinks deeply enough from the chalice of the sublime is eventually compelled to drain also the flagons of failure, disgrace, humiliation, sorrow, and despair? I could not in those days have imagined ever coming to regret being the center of attention, nor was I yet ready to admit anything harsh or disturbing to the sacred precincts of Art, but as I lit my cigarette, surrounded by the hysteria-edged adulation of the crowd, I could finally admit that those Atlantic storms had scared the bejesus out of me.

James Warner’s writing has appeared in Eclectica, Pindeldyboz, Eyeshot, Monkey Bicycle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco. His web site is www.jameswarner.net.