An Eventful Convention

 

Rogers attended a business convention.  The gathering was held in a coastal city, one of those places with a charming inner harbor but no actual sea shore.  Rogers, who was said to be a good father and family man, made a detour to his mother-in-law’s home to drop off his two children.  With his wife, who was six months pregnant, he drove to the town and registered at the convention hotel, a skyscraper with green fluted glass walls and a restaurant well-known for its seafood at its apex.  

The convention began with a plenary session, scheduled for the morning after his arrival.  Then, there were “networking” and “break-out” sessions after lunch.  A dance in the grand ballroom was appointed for that night and, then, there was another meeting of the entire group scheduled for the next morning, commencing at an hour decently late because it was anticipated that most of the participants would be hungover.  A famous figure in the Administration had been hired to address inspirational remarks to the assembly.  Then, there were to be farewells and the convention would be adjourned a little before the noon hour.  Although the ostensible purpose for the assembly was educational, in fact, the proceedings were designed to allow business representatives maximum access to their customers so that they could buy them drinks and expensive meals and, otherwise, bestow small favors in order to ingratiate themselves.  The convention was deemed important, but not too important, by Rogers’ boss – he was vacationing in the Cayman Islands with his new wife and said that he would “catch-up” with Rogers while the assembly was under way.  

On the first night, Rogers skipped the welcome banquet.  He met a customer quite by accident while waiting for elevator and said that his pregnant wife was too tired from traveling to attend the banquet.  But, in fact, his wife had made reservations at a famous restaurant locating in a renovated warehouse on one of the quays.  The inner harbor had narrow cobblestone streets lined with expensive boutiques and small picturesque bars, some of them said to date back to the previous century.  There was a small contretemps when Rogers sighted the customer to whom he had lied on the other side of the bar waiting for his table and, when Rogers’ reservation was announced, the maitre de said his name in a loud, even brazen, tone.  But the two men pretended not to see one another and all went well.  The other fellow seemed to be with a woman who was not his wife and, so, it was best to avoid an encounter that night.

The sessions the next day were tedious but by mid-afternoon everyone was half-drunk and the seminar rooms were mostly empty, only young people were there still earnestly listening to the speakers.  Most of the more experienced attendees were in the corridors or clustered around the stations selling drinks.  Rogers thought things were going rather well and made some new business contacts.  An important customer asked Rogers if they might leave the convention hotel and continue drinking in one of the ancient inner harbor taverns.  Rogers said that this was a fine idea.  The customer wanted to pick up women. He had come “stag” to the convention and was planning to avoid the dance – “you know, I’m not much of a dancer myself,” Rogers replied to him.  Of course, Rogers said that the drinks and dinner would be his treat.  

At the tavern, they drank a pitcher of grog made with Bacardi rum and other cordials.  The drink was named after one of the hurricanes that vexed this part of the coast and it was a powerful decoction.  For some reason, Rogers hadn’t had occasion to drink during the last six months and so the booze had a disastrous effect on him.  He felt sick and went into the toilet to vomit.  Then, the customer said that he wanted to smoke a cigar and, so, Rogers used his credit card to buy two Dominican cigars.  The customer smoked his cigar in a wet alleyway between sinister walls of crumbling brikc and mortar.  A light drizzle was falling. Rogers put his own cigar in his breast pocket, discovering in that way a bone from the barbecued ribs they had eaten a few hours earlier.  They went from bar to bar.  On one side-street, they watched several men mugging a tourist.  The tourist fell onto the wet cobblestones and the muggers kicked him in the head.  Rogers found himself groping a fat blonde who smelled of patchouli.  He had lost his customer somewhere.  

The inner city streets were an intricate maze and Rogers had difficulty finding his way back to the  hotel.  Sometimes, he could see the tower of green glass, a slippery-looking shard embedded in the dark rainy sky, but there seemed to be no way to reach the place.

At last, Rogers stumbled into the lobby of the hotel.  An elevator with glass sides whisked two men falling all over one another up to the rooms above.  Rogers’ boss and his new wife were checking in at the reception desk.  They seemed bedraggled and worn.  Rogers’ boss said to him: “Long night I guess.”  “Looks the same for you too,” Rogers said, immediately regretting that he had, perhaps, insulted his boss’ wife who was ordinarily quite glamorous.  A softly purring escalator lifted them up to the mezzanine where the ballroom was located.  The debris from the party was scattered across the big room and some music stands were still located on a dais at the head of the hall.  Confetti and streamers were strewn about and there were smashed glasses on the floor and some chairs knocked over.  “Looks like quite a brawl,” Rogers’ boss said.  His wife smiled.  She asked Rogers if he had received the little gift that they had sent to his room.  “I don’t think so,” Rogers said, but he wasn’t certain.  

The corridors in the hotel were broad and people were still padding about, reeking of booze and barefoot.  Rogers’ suddenly recalled that his wife had come to the convention with him.  Presumably, she was enraged at having been abandoned.  Rogers couldn’t recall the room number.  He walked slowly up and down the hallways hoping that one of the doors would trigger something in his memory.  A door was ajar and seemed familiar to him – he pushed it open and saw a woman sitting on a bed with dark, accusing eyes.  She seemed startled by him.  Rogers didn’t think that she was his wife, but wasn’t wholly sure and, so, raising his hand to show that he meant no harm, he stepped across the threshold.  The woman muttered at him and gestured toward the telephone as if she were about to summon aid.  Rogers backed out of the chamber and stood in the hall.  

Perhaps, he was on the wrong floor.  He found a stair-well.  Up or down? Rogers wondered.  He went down – the stairwell wasn’t air-conditioned and it was warm and stank of spilled booze.  The floor below seemed somehow more familiar to Rogers although, in fact, it looked exactly like the corridor and rows of locked doors above.  Rogers thought that he should call his wife and ask her for the room number, but, then, he remembered that this had all happened many years ago, before cell-phones were invented.  So there was no way to place a call and, in any event, he expected his wife to be distraught with anger at him.

At last, he found his room.  His luggage was on the floor beside the bed.  There was no trace of his wife.  Someone had spilled some red fluid on the floor by the toilet.  The patch of liquid was about four feet square and a pale color, like diluted tomato juice.  Rogers wondered whether it was cranberry juice or, possibly, red wine.

It was pretty apparent that Rogers’ wife had fled to her mother’s house.  Rogers knew that his marriage was wrecked and that this was the beginning of the many years of catastrophes that would afflict him.  On the pillow of the unmade bed, a tin of sugar cookies from the Cayman Islands sat unopened.  The tin was decorated with small, smiling alligators.  The cookies hadn’t yet been opened.  The stain on the floor near the toilet troubled Rogers.  He moved the cookies to the night-stand and lay down in the bed, fully clothed.  His head ached and, when he shut his eyes, he saw the puddle of red glowing as if it were radioactive.  Someone would have to clean up that mess.   

Via Crucis

 

Abertees is eleven miles northwest of the Minot Air Force Base.  More precisely, the gravel road to Abertees runs for eleven miles from the where the black-top ends at the westernmost gate to the AFB.  A rancher talking too loudly in a cowboy-bar in Minot said that there were some folk gathered out there, doomsday types, plotting sabotage against the base.  This kind of thinking could corrupt airman at the base.  A report was made and Jordan was told to take an MP vehicle and drive out there for some low-level recon.  In the last month, the western fence had been breached in a couple of locations, the chain-links sheared apart, and there was suspicion that anti-federal cells were active in the area.  The commanding officer told Jordan: “We want to head off mischief of that sort.”

Jordan thought that he should pack a lunch.  There were probably no cafes or fast food places where he was going.  He thought that he would stop at his quarters and make himself a sandwich.  But, then, someone called him on his cell-phone, however, and he was distracted.  

The AFB’s footprint is a little irregular on its western flank and the road crossed fenced government land, tracts extending out beyond the principal perimeter.  There were no checkpoints, just cattle guards made of metal bars crossing the gravel and tall fences so that Jordan drove onto AFB land for a thousand yards, passing the perimeter fence, and, then, off again.  The terrain was grey under grey skies, dry-land wheat growing on the barren hills that had once been sand-dunes, it seemed, hidden under the vegetation rippling out to the horizon like the waves of a choppy sea.  Marshes hid between the knuckles of hill with a little open water that the wind was stirring like soup in a pot.  The slopes too steep for machine cultivation were planted in hay and Jordan saw some cattle in the distance.  A braided creek ran along the side of the gravel road, no trees growing along its switchbacks and, so, open and exposed to the enormous skies.  At one point, Jordan passed a seamed concrete pad with a Christmas tree of pipes and meters – it was a capped-off oil well from which the pumping equipment had been removed.  

Heavy trucks had broken the asphalt into a mosaic of black chips.  The road followed a draw into the hills, running beside the twisting stream that was naked to the sky, dark water flowing among reefs of gravel and undercut banks where the creek had eroded a black channel under the sod.  Unlike the stream, the two-lane blacktop ran arrow-straight, seeking out the highest point on the highest treeless ridge.  An oculus had opened in the eastern sky and some silvery rays of light shot down to sweep across the grasslands, tinting the crumpled hills blonde where the beams came to earth.

From the hilltop, Jordan could see Abertees below, the place displayed like a diagram on the wrinkled winter-wheat and hay fields.  Some trees wrapped around the side of an oval pond that looked icy with slate-grey waters.  In the trees, Jordan glimpsed a few houses, rusting harrows and other implements, farm wreckage abandoned in wooded ravines fanning down the side of a barren bluff that stood behind the town.  The sphinx-shaped hill seemed to nudge the village with its pale tic-tac-toe grid of streets into the cold lake.  A column of tempest-shredded utility poles marched in single file down to the hamlet.  Across the lake, a gravel pit was scored into the hillside with a rickety-looking tower with conveyor drags like spider-legs set in the center of the crater.  A rich man’s house with beige towers and a separate pole-barn for cars overlooked the town from a hilltop beside the gravel pit.  The edges of the lake were bare – the sheet of water just tucked itself under the neighboring hillsides.  A green patch of flame-shaped cypresses marked a small cemetery stuck like a band aid on the side of the crouching-beast bluff.  

Abertees didn’t look like much of anything and, strangely, the closer he approached, the less there was to see.  An obelisk-shaped grain elevator along the road leading down to the town was abandoned, leaking rotting corn from its sagging walls.  Several of the houses in the village were also deserted, half-hidden behind thickets of unruly brush.  Where the road crossed the grid in the center of the hamlet, a couple of brick commercial buildings were boarded shut.  The coop gas station ran on credit card only, just an island of pumps in vacant lot.  Next to a couple of burned out houses, Jordan saw ramshackle trailers, scarcely fit for camping.  An elementary school occupying a block near the intersection was pierced by trees growing up through the broken roof.  Beyond the intersection, the two-land highway turned to gravel and became an undisciplined scrawl across the grasslands.  

No one was around, although several of the derelict houses had old pickup trucks near them.  At the end of a dirt lane, a bar with a curved brick facade and opaque glass bricks for windows seemed to be open and three trucks stood next to it.  If the place was full of dooms-day preppers or militia men, Jordan didn’t see any evidence of them.  He turned onto another side-street that led to a Catholic church were the lawn had been mown recently, a brick nave topped by a squat bell-tower where a fissure cleft in the mortar was green with crawling ivy.  The church stood in front of a hollow in the hillside where Jordan saw a path and some big urns overflowing with livid roses.  A figure in black was walking in the garden.  This was as good a place as any to nose around.  Jordan parked the MP vehicle near the walk leading to the church’s front door.  

The door gave a little when he pulled, as if chained somehow inside, but it didn’t open.  He walked around the building, passing a couple of graves with low granite markers in the shadow of the walls.  A few split logs had been pounded into the gentle sloping hillside to make some rustic steps leading to a cobblestone path.  A metal arch over the path was marked with iron letters that said WAY OF THE CROSS.  On a tree, just beyond the archway, someone had nailed a yellow sign lettered with the words: “You’re on camera – smile!” next to single staring eye.  Pots of roses stood at intervals along the path.   

Jordan thought he would catch up with the person walking in the woods.  The trail went slightly uphilling zigzagging between old trees that drooped as if in exhaustion over the path.  At each angle in the cobblestone path, a small hut made from greenish fieldstone hunched over a shadowy niche.  A pane of plexi-glass sheltered terra-cotta statues lodged in the alcove and painted pink and red and green and robin’s egg blue.  The window opening into the first station was wet with condensation and blurred the figures behind.  Some Gothic letters spelled out words that Jordan couldn’t read – it was a foreign language although he saw the name JESU among the unintelligible words.  In the niche, Jesus was led like a donkey on a tether away from a man in a red toga seated on a throne.  In the background, a column was shown in bas relief next to a pale dome. 

The path led slightly uphill between glades of cottonwood trees with charred-looking bark like crocodile leather.  Jordan didn’t see anyone on the trail ahead of him.  The stations on the way of the cross were surrounded by disheveled-looking box-elder trees grouped around the stone shelters.  Cold winds had already sheared off the leaves the treetops and they lay withered and brittle on the path.  But lower branches, protected by the hollow, were still green.

Each hut was marked with a cross embedded in the mortar above the window shielding the figures.  Jesus wore a white robe and his pink feet were barefoot and vulnerable.  His beard was camel-colored, an incongruous shadow on his soft jaw.  Although several of the stations showed him falling, the drapery of his sculpted white robe was inviolate, unbesmirched.  In one display, the savior encountered several women whose faces were strangely white and inert.  Each station bore words in barbarous-looking letters that Jordan couldn’t decipher. The savior’s torturers had sharp profiles like mallets or axes and their eyes were dark gashes in the terra cotta.  They tore Christ’s clothing from his torso that was stained by little curlicue rivulets of scarlet.  The savior’s breast, torn and bleeding, hung like a shield from the cross and his girlish face was turned aside, mouth contorted with suffering.  When mourners peeled Jesus from the place where he had been nailed, his body seemed unnaturally elongated and boneless, a ribbon of pale flesh hanging like a limp banner from the splintery wood.  The background was now black and riven with a painted bolt of lightning and pillow-soft skull rested at the base of the cross.  The story ended with shadowy niche in which Jesus rested on his back on a grey slab, a frieze of grief-stricken women caressing his naked body.              

The trail made a dog-leg from Christ’s entombment to a small chapel built like a kiln from yellow brick.  Narrow stained glass windows opened into the structure just below its small bronze cupola.  Perhaps, the figure that he had glimpsed on the trail had entered the chapel.  Jordan tried the door and it yielded inward into a dark octagonal space.  The air smelled of mildew and there was an altar against one of the walls above which Jesus was being killed again.  Some women stood under his corpse, featureless like half-melted candles.  There was no one in the dark, evil-smelling chamber.  

Outside, Jordan heard a faint trickle of running water.  A few yards uphill, another fieldstone shed stone amidst bright red sumac.  Next to the shed, water was gathering in a tub-shaped trough and, then, flowing down a brick-lined channel next to the path.  Jordan walked to the shed and looked into it.

The cross on its ceramic plaque embedded in the mortar above the case’s window had slipped sideways so that it showed as an X.  Someone had fired a bullet through the plexi-glass and there was a round wound in that material, big enough to inspect with your finger.  Below the display, hooked and barbed letters spelled out the words HIMMEL AUF ERDE.  Jordan said this to himself, slowly sounding out the letters.  

Behind the plexi-glass, the tableaux seemed to show a grotto far underground.  A mass of stalactites dangled down from the arch over the figures.  Looking more closely, Jordan saw that the protuberant formations were in fact angels like tumors with vestigial fins falling toward the earth like a hail of bombs.  A mighty oxen and a great lion were both tamed to the yoke and hitched together to pull a sort of chariot.  On the chariot, a figure stood with hands upraised like pale tentacles.  The bullet shot through the glass must have hit the figure because it was headless.  On the brawny shoulder of the bullock, an eagle perched, bearing in its talons a pale swath of banner, also inscribed with illegible words.  A raven perched on the lion’s mane with its beak partly open as if about to speak.

Except for the trickle of water flowing from the battered-looking stone sarcophagus, it was very still.  Even the wind had ceased its whisper in the trees.

Far away, a dull concussion sounded.  

Then, something honked in the air.  At first, Jordan thought it was geese flying overhead and squeaking above like a rusty hinge.  But the sound, twisting through a convolute of some kind, became a sky-trumpet.  The blare sounded overhead like scarlet plumage blown through the sky.  

***

Across the waters of the cold lake at Abertees (a ghost town for all intents and purposes), within the crater of the gravel pit, Jerome sat in the cab of a two-ton truck and wondered whether the battery would fire the engine and, so, he muttered something under his breath, an incantation for good luck as he gazed across the hood of the big vehicle to the snowplow mounted there like the tusk of a mighty beast, a heavy iron blade forged like a weapon.   The truck was parked on a slab of concrete next to the crusher machine with its web of conveyors all rising to a pinnacle overhead and there were conical piles of stone sorted according to dimension (pea-size, river-rock stones, heaps of cobbles as big as loaves of bread) next to the vehicle that Jerome was attempting to start.  The engine turned over slowly at first, but, then, caught and the hydraulics engaged, suddenly completing the gesture that the machine had been implementing when the truck was shut down a month before, dropping the heavy snow plow’s iron blade onto the concrete with a loud bang, a sound like thunder that spread away from the two-ton truck and ricocheted off the steep walls of the quarry and, then, rolled across the grey waters of the lake into Abertees (almost a ghost town).  Jerome put the truck in gear, forgetting for a moment about the heavy iron blade and, as the truck lurched forward, the metal plow scraped against the cement, striking up a flare of flying orange sparks at the same time that the metal squealed, at first, a raw squawking sound, and, then, a high pitched note, a tone a little like a trumpet sounding a fanfare and this noise whirled again around the quarry and echoed from its sheer walls, and, then, because it had nowhere else to go, swept across the still waters of the tarn into Abertees (more or less a ghost town) and, then, Jerome stopped the vehicle, engaging the hydraulics to lift the blade, and climbed out of the two-ton truck, the engine still running (he was worried that if he shut it off, the truck wouldn’t start), and walked a dozen yards to the utility trailer near the crusher machine.  Inside the trailer, Jerome poured himself a cup of hot coffee from his thermos, its insulated metal sides decorated with a red and black tartan pattern and it seemed to him that his sense of smell, in recent years impaired by sinus infections and allergies, revived, then, in the most extraordinary way, because the smell of his coffee was rich and dark and altogether delicious, a wonderful aroma that lingered even as he left the utility trailer and walked with a spring in his step (no longer feeling any trace of his rheumatism) back to the truck into which he climbed, not noticing that the snow plow was no longer there because when something vanishes, when something simply goes away there is nothing at all to notice and, then, Jerome put the vehicle in gear again and looked to his side, over the cold lake and toward the village where he saw several people clad in white garments standing next to the slate-grey water bearing in their arms banners of some sort, a sight that surprised him because Abertees, after all, was deserted and, indeed, really nothing more than a ghost town.   

***

Jordan walked past the stone stations crouched along the crooked path and, then, down the timber steps to his van.  He had forgotten the mission that had brought him to Abertees.  Whatever it was, he had apparently accomplished.  The sky had cleared and the sun was now shining brightly.

The road seemed less battered and smoother than he recalled from his trip into town.  Jordan drove to the top of the high ridge.  At the crest of the hill, he could see for many miles.  The empty prairie rolled to the horizon, a wilderness of brown and blonde hills.  He gazed into the distance but couldn’t see the Air Force Base.  Apparently, it was too far away to be visible from this hilltop.  

On the windy ridge, the gravel shoulder widened so that he could pull the MP van off the asphalt. He veered to the right to park.  Jordan was slightly hungry and he wondered about the time.  He glanced at his watch but saw that it had stopped.  On the passenger seat next to him, Jordan saw his lunchbox, decorated with a red and white tartan pattern.  He must have packed a lunch before leaving on this assignment.  

In the lunch pail, Jordan found a ham sandwich made with just the right amount of mayonnaise and meat on wheat bread.  There were even four pickle slices tucked into the ham.  An apple was also in the tartan-colored box, big and red and so bright that it seemed to glow from within.  Jordan rolled down his window and shut off the van.  

Something white was moving on a knoll about a mile away.  Some people in pale robes were walking in a procession in the tall, bleached grass.  Normally, the sky above the military base was scribbled with crisscrossed contrails.  But this afternoon, the sky was unblemished, a blue crystal vault.  The heavens were unmarked and so blue that it made Jordan dizzy to look up into them.     

   

Good Boy

 

“Dogs keep evolving.  You can measure this in many ways.  Look at old movies showing Rin-Tin-Tin.  Rinty is obviously very clever in a canid sort of way.  But he’s inexpressive.  He doesn’t grin for the camera and remains generally inert in terms of his acting.  He’s defined by what he does not how he emotes.  The dog looks like a wolf and fur is dark so that you can’t really see how his face looks – his head is just a blur of black.  When he runs, Rinty doesn’t lope – he dashes very low to the ground with his legs churning under him like pistons.  It’s feral and not really photogenic.”

Harry was sitting on his porch with his dog, Frodo.  The sun was setting in the haze from forest fires burning in the nearby mountains.

“You can detect some increase in expressivity in Lassie.  But, Lassie is pretty much a one-trick pony – she whines to communicate and can’t really act: she’s always disagreeably subservient.  But the dog is gorgeous and has features that the camera can read, at least, to a lilmited extent.

Frodo was a Wheaten terrier.  The smoke in the air bothered him a little.

“Take a look at Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  In that novel, there’s a dog, Karenin, that smiles – in fact, the last section of the novel is called “Karenin’s Smile”.   As far as I know, this is the first dog in history to be described as “smiling”.  When people first read Kundera’s novel in 1984, they were puzzled: “Could dogs actually smile?”  Well, when you look at them, of course, they have learned to smile.  No one would have any question about that today.  Each year, each generation, dogs become more and more expressive, more communicative.  They become more like their masters and mistresses.  Those old working dogs in the 19th century, the mastiffs guarding farms and the pit bulls in the coal mines and the little spit-terriers running on treadmills in kitchens – they turned rotisseries – these animals were pretty much just machines with wagging tails.  They didn’t have much human about them.  But, with each passing generation, dogs become more and more conventionally “loveable” – the more breeds progress, if that’s the right word, away from their origins as working animals, the more human they become.  In the course of single human’s lifetime, you can see this quite clearly.”

The smoke particles that reddened the sun made Frodo sneeze violently.

Harry replied: “You know, Frodo, I don’t necessarily disagree with you.”

Frodo said: “You got it, boss.”

Eridanos

 

When Wettstein awoke from anesthesia, he felt confused.  It was not so much a mental state as a physical condition.  Something was missing.  Mid-day, he felt a little better and his nausea had subsided.  It was an out-patient procedure and, so, his wife drove him home.

After his nap, Wettstein hobbled onto his porch.  The insects that are legion at the end of summer fizzed in the tops of the trees and, at dusk, fireflies beckoned to one another in the lilac bushes.  Wettstein was reading short stories by an Italian writer reckoned to be heir to Borges and Kafka.  (At least, this was what had been printed on the jacket of his book.)  He thought the stories were overrated, but wondered if the author’s short novel was more accomplished.  Wettstein read carefully, made pencil notes in the margin, and, also, corrected typographical errors in the print.  When it became too dark to read, he stroked the fur on his old dog’s throat and behind her ears.  When all was said and done, Wettstein thought that he was missing about twenty years – where were his memories of that part of his life?  He recalled only a few things from that period: some plane trips, a woman, a couple movies and books that had pleased him, high mountains and a skiing accident, a bout with pneumonia.  Wettstein supposed that it was true of most people: if you have lived long enough, much of your life, which consists of memories, will be inaccessible to you.  

The short novel by the Italian author was no longer in print.  But copies were available through some of the used book sellers on-line.  Wettstein was puzzled that most of the booksellers were asking an exorbitant price for the novel – apparently, paperback editions of the English translation were rare: most of them were selling for around $150 dollars.  There was an exception, however, a discount book business in Atlanta and, so, Wettstein ordered the volume from that seller, providing his credit card for the purchase – the novel cost $19 dollars with shipping.  Wettstein supposed that the book would be badly damaged in some way or that the transaction simply would fail, but, in fact, after four days, the package arrived with the novel inside.  

The book was handsome, unblemished and, apparently, unread.  The short novel was printed in large elegant type (Bodoni, Wettstein observed) on crisp cream-colored paper.  The book’s covers were reinforced, stiffer than an ordinary paperback, and more durable.  The volume was elegant and fit nicely into Wettstein’s hand.  On the front end-board, an image from an early painting by Edvard Munch was reproduced in vibrant color, something moody and brooding, and both covers were turned-in so that their fore-ends could be used as book-marks, an aspect of the edition that Wettstein admired.  The pages were set in an adhesive binding.  On one of the endpapers, the publisher had listed other books issued, apparently, as part of a series.  Wettstein surveyed the titles of the other volumes with interest.  The novel was re-issued from a previously copyrighted translation, this new edition printed by a publishing house called Eridanos Press.  

Wettstein read the book with pleasure.  The novel was interesting and well-written and the translation was lucid and unostentatious.  He wondered about the other novels identified as part of the Eridanos’ series.  Most of the books were unknown to him, although he recognized some of the authors.  The novels seemed largely to be works by surrealist or symbolist writers – he recognized something by Huysmans and some short stories from Marcel Schwob.  There were several books by writers with German names, none of whom familiar to him: what was The Waterfalls of Slunj by someone called Heimito von Doderer? who was Hans Henny Jahn? What could possibly be the subject of a novel called The Hierodule or another: Five-and-a-third Deaths?  What was The Cryptogamia by Akutagawa. Wettstein had read only one of the books in the series, The Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski and that was many years ago, when the world held a different aspect for him. (Wettstein was pretty sure that the book was now lost.)  He vaguely recalled that The Baphomet was an icy account of some sort of perversion involving a decapitated and bearded head.  Klossowski, Wettstein recalled, was the brother of the painter Balthus, and an expert in allegorical emblem engravings involving alchemy.  Several books purported to be short novels by Pirandello, or short story collections.  Most of the writers were French or Italian.     

That afternoon, Wettstein looked up some of the books on the internet.  All of the Eridanos editions were out-of-print and, apparently, rare.  Many of the paperbacks were advertised by second-hand book dealers with prices exceeding two-hundred dollars.  Presumably, some bibliophiles collected these volumes.  Pictures showing the book displayed very handsome paperback volumes similar to the book that Wettstein held in his hand – the editions were tightly bound with fore-edges turned-in, covers decorated with paintings by surrealist or expressionist artists.  

His second hospitalization was more eventful.  After his surgery, Wettstein’s lawyer brought him some papers to sign.  He couldn’t communicate because of the tube in his throat, but was able to write on the legal pad that the lawyer rested on his breast.  The lawyer acted as if he had known Wettstein for many years and, as if they had been involved in adventures together.  But Wettstein was embarrassed that he couldn’t recognize the man and wondered if his wife and attorney weren’t plotting something against him.  He was too tired to read the papers that he signed and they might have been anything.  

The days blended into one another.  Then, the tube was extracted from his throat and he was able to eat a little.  An ambulance took him home.  The book by the Italian writer that he had been reading when the emergency occurred was at his bedside.  The binding was handsome and cool to the touch and the print was large and elegant and instantly legible: the letters seem to have sculpted by the gentle touch of millions of eyes on them and their barbs had been polished away so that the characters were smooth as pebbles on the shore of the ocean.  For some reason, Wettstein could remember the events in the book much more clearly than his own life – decades were still missing and the void seemed to be growing.  But the book’s events were clear: a fighter was lost in the mountains; in a remote valley, there was an ancient villa, almost completely abandoned.  But an old man lived in the villa with huge savage mastiffs.  And there was another presence, a whiff of perfume, and a tomb and, beneath the labyrinth of the villa’s rooms a crypt with instruments of torture.  None of these things were retained in his memory, but the moment he took up the book, all of its details returned to him.

After completing the novel, Wettstein studied the book more carefully.  Eridanos was said to be headquartered at a place called Hygiene, Colorado.  (There was no address only a post-office box.) Was this a real location or some kind of sly, perverse fiction?  A new cleaning lady was puttering around the house.  Wettstein’s hospital bed was set up in the formal dining room and, through an arched entrance, he could see the woman kneeling on the floor, mercilessly polishing the hard wood.  Her posture was such that Wettstein could see her rump and upper torso, as well as her arms rowing away at the hardwood floor, but her head and face was not visible to him from his vantage in the big white bed with its stainless steel rails.  For some reason, he could now recall the cover of The Baphomet, an image of a severed head with angry dark eyes grimacing – a detail of a renaissance oil painting of Goliath’s decapitated head or, perhaps, the trophy of John the Baptist presented to Salome?  The cover, as visualized by Wettstein, was red and yellow except for the lurid image of the severed head. 

Most of Wettstein’s books were in the basement – at least, he believed this to be true.  The formal dining room was empty of books – there were a couple of book reviews on a table and a New Yorker but nothing else to read.  As far as he could see through the arched entry into the living room, the books had all been removed from that place as well.  Apparently, his library was now in the basement.  Wettstein cleared his throat loudly and the cleaning woman looked up at him.  He asked her to his bedside and told her to go downstairs and see if she could find a copy of The Baphomet among his books.  The woman looked at him suspiciously and her English was poor.  Wettstein found a pencil on his night stand and wrote the title of the book on an index card.  He repeated his instructions to the woman but her dark eyes were dull and uncomprehending.  She seemed to smell slightly of vinegar.  The woman went away and Wettstein heard her feet on the stairs.  After ten minutes, she returned, panting a little from the steps.  

“Is no book like that,” she said.  She handed him back the card.  

“I have thousands of books,” Wettstein said.  “You couldn’t have looked through all of them.”

“Many, many books,” the cleaning lady said. She nodded.  “But not that one.”

Wettstein said: “But you could scarcely have searched.”

“In the one room,” the cleaning lady told him, “all books are same, maybe ten different, but all the same ten books.  Hundreds.”

This made no sense to Wettstein.  Why would he be warehousing many copies (a hundred?) of the same book.  

The cleaning lady left his bedside.  The shadows lengthened.  He heard his wife’s car in the driveway.  He couldn’t ask her to search for the book.  She didn’t like the basement and was afraid of what she might find down there.  

The next day, Wettstein looked at pictures showing Hygiene, Colorado.  Google images on his Ipad showed a church made from grey and brown field stone standing among some disheveled trees.  In another picture there were more trees with silvery leaves (a species of olive it seemed) shading a few old graves.  A wooden general store with gas pumps and a covered wraparound porch was shown in another photograph, the sort of place that you see at isolated intersections where roads meet in the wilderness.  A tall mountain, its stony upper terraces and peak covered in snow, rose above the junction where there was a café and a street that dead-ended at a row of round pawn-shaped grain bins.  Nothing suggested any kind of publishing enterprise.

The river Eridanos, Wettstein thought that he remembered, flowed from moors where sedge-rimmed marshes were cupped in pot-holes in the tawny, thistle-covered barrens.  The river was the color of tea and flowed north through immense forests, a broad turbid flood undisturbed by any white water or rapids.  Because of the river’s northward course, ice dammed the river near its mouth on a cold grey sea and this caused the Eridanos upstream to flood and change course, wrapping itself around the woods to create innumerable grove-islands when the water was high.  In seasons of high water, the main channel shifted several miles, excavating prehistoric forests that had been drowned by the river and buried in silt.  When the current cut open mud banks, sometimes, beds of golden amber were exposed.  Many of the bright cells of amber preserved brown and black insects in the translucent stone.  

Wettstein asked the cleaning lady to find his atlas so that he could check his impressions as to the river.  She didn’t understand his request.  On the internet on his I-pad, Wettstein learned that the Eridanos river didn’t exist in reality and was said to be mythical.  In his Theogony, Hesiod described the river as flowing into the great waters that encircled the world, Oceanus and Tethys.  Eridanos flowed into the circumambient sea between the Amber andTin Islands.  But this description was not helpful in locating the river – the Amber and Tin Islands are also mythological and don’t correlate with real places. A thousand years later, the monk, Nonnus, wrote that Typhon bathed his monstrous coils in the Eridanos – but this reference in the Dionysiaca (why has no one produced an English translation of this work? Wettstein wondered) probably should be construed only to mean that the constellation named after the great snake was reflected in the waters of the river wherever it was located.  Another source said that Eridanos was a stream near Athens that had once flowed down from the heights to trickle through the city’s agora – but, then, the creek’s canal was bricked over so that the stream flowed underground and, after a few hundred years, its whereabouts were lost as memories faded.  Things could go missing and simply be forgotten – Wettstein knew this all too well.  Virgil, in his Aeneid, solved the problem as to the location of the missing river by simply putting the Eridanos in the Underworld.  It was one of the streams that watered that mournful realm.  Far from preserving recollections, presumably, to bathe in the Eridanos was to lose your memory, to forget about things – so it was odd, even paradoxical, that a publishing house, an enterprise that preserves thoughts and ideas, should be named after such a river.  

The lawyer made a house-call.  He showed Wettstein some records relating to his business.  There were more papers to sign.  The woman who had been sitting by his bed in the hospital was with the lawyer.  She looked worried and, from her expression, Wettstein construed her to be his wife.  Some things were still a bit fuzzy to him.   

Wettstein asked the lawyer why a business would be located in a tiny town in the West without an address, but merely a post-office box.  The lawyer winked at him and said that if a company wanted to avoid process – that is, being sued – it might establish its domicile in a place where there was only a post-office box.  In most states, a complaint can not be served by mailing the suit papers to a post office box.  “If you don’t have a registered agent for service,” the lawyer said, “they can’t get process, can’t get the lawsuit started.  So it will buy you time.  If you can buy time, say a couple months in litigation, that can sometimes be very helpful.”  Wettstein assumed that there were suits and so he asked him about them.  “Settled,” the lawyer said.  “Many years ago.  Don’t you remember?”  Wettstein said that he remembered but he did not.

The lawyer opened his brief case.  It was a new brief case made from leather that hadn’t been completely cured and there was a faint skunk-like odor about it.  The lawyer showed Wettstein some papers.  They appeared to be bankruptcy filings.  “This is 90% complete,” the lawyer told Wettstein.  From the papers, Wettstein concluded that he had been once been involved in the publishing business.

After the lawyer left, Wettstein was very tired and, so, he took a nap.  When he awoke, he found his I-pad resting among the sheets next to him.  He found some more pictures of Hygiene, Colorado.  Above some steepled foothills, a big mountain rose into the sky.  Half of it was bare and without trees and, during most of the year, there was snow on the heights.  In other pictures, the mountain’s summit was without snow and brown, the color of a clay flower pot that you might buy in a nursery.  Wettstein thought that there was a picture of that mountain in one of the bathrooms of his house, but he couldn’t use the toilet any more and, so, wasn’t sure about that – one mountain looks pretty much like another.  He recalled skiing and the cold of ice cast up against his cheeks as he chopped his way downhill, cutting back and forth through powder snow.  He must not have been a very good skier – there was a painful spot and some lumps in the joint of his left ankle, probably a healed fracture sustained on the slopes.  Wettstein thought that a person would remember sharp pain, but, apparently, this wasn’t always the case.

The little field stone church in the photographs of Hygiene had been built by German Anabaptists, members of something called the Church of the Brethren United in Christ.  Historical pictures showed a three-story wooden mansion near the church.  This was a sanitarium for patients with tuberculosis and the reason for the village’s name. Tall walnut trees shaded the sanitarium’s porches and turrets.  Erected in 1883, the sanitarium served patients for only a few years and, then, was transformed into a hotel.  People smoked in bed in those days and the sanitarium burned to the ground in 1926.  Wettstein imagined the lung patients sitting in quilts and comforters in their wheelchairs.  They looked up to the mountain with its white peaks like horns. When was Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain published?  How much money would a book like that make for its publisher?

The Church of the Brethren denied free will except in one respect: God’s grace is resistable, they maintained.  So you could will damnation upon yourself, but not salvation – the latter was achieved by the gift of God’s grace, an election that no good works could earn.  When he was little, Wettstein had been taken by his mother to an immense church.  The church smelled of cedar wood and it’s inside was dark as a hunting chalet.  Some lights flashed on a stage and there was an organ with pipes as big as the muzzles of cannons and the sound that the instrument made was thunderous.  The great auditorium stood among an encampment of tents and the ocean was nearby, long lines of green waves sweeping land-ward and breaking on the cobbled grey beach.  Wettstein recalled his mother holding his hand.  In Ocean Grove, where the church was located, cars were forbidden on Sundays.  Their car was parked outside the village, at the edge of the Asbury Park boardwalk, and to reach the vast wooden auditorium, his mother led him, with another lady who seemed to be older, across an iron bridge over a canal that smelled of saltwater and dead fish.  The sea shore also smelled of saltwater taffy, although this was behind them, on the boardwalk.  The Church of the Brethren built the auditorium at Ocean Grove for revival meetings and it was the largest wooden structure in the world.  Wettstein marveled that it had not yet burned to the ground.  Later, the Brethren merged with the United Methodist Church.

In those days, women wore hats to church.  In the great auditorium, men in black suits carried offering plates mounted on long brass poles and they used those lances to probe the worshipers who put dollar bills and coins in the baskets.  Everything was very well organized.  Wettstein was just a little boy when he attended this church and, he thought, it was one time only.  The experience filled him with the desire to tell others about what he had seen and felt in the church and how the organ had sounded so that you felt its music rumbling in your belly and backbone.  Yes, he explain this to others.  Wettstein thought that his memories of the church auditorium at Ocean Grove were somehow related to the problem of the books published by Eridanos Press, headquartered in Hygiene, Colorado, but he couldn’t quite draw the connection.

Once, Wettstein had enjoyed sitting on his porch and reading.  There was a nurse now who came to see him every other day.  She helped him into his wheelchair and rolled it onto the front porch.  The days were warm, but evening no longer retained the heat from the sunlit afternoon.  After a while, Wettstein felt cold and wished that he had a quilt wrapped over his shoulders and arms and nested across his lap.  He looked across the neighborhood and above the shingled roofs and the crowns of the trees.  Was there a mountain that loomed overhead with white arms outstretched above the foothills?  Wettstein knew that the terrain was flat, but his eyes showed himself something different.  Darkness descended and several streetlights were nudged on by the shadows.  The streetlights were amber-colored and the night flooded the neighborhood like a great, slow-moving river.