All Around Atlantis (9 page)

Shapiro looked at him. “I only arrived last—”

“Last night,” Beale said impatiently. He drummed his fingers on the tape recorder. “Well, but just generally, you know. Just something…spontaneous.”

Shapiro pressed his fingers to the corners of his eyes.

“Not acceptable. I see, not acceptable,” Beale said, bitterly. “Well, in that case…we could talk, for example, about what it feels like to come down here as an American.”

“As an American?” Shapiro said. “I'm not
down
here as an American. I'm not down here
as
anything. I'm down here as a
pianist
.”

“Yes,” Beale said. “Quite.”

Heat began to creep over Shapiro's skin as Beale stared at him.

“You know,” Beale said, “I've always wondered. And this is something that I think would be very interesting to the radio audience. How do instrumentalists feel about their relationship—that is, via music, of course—to the composer?”

“What are you—” Shapiro began.

“Well, the very
word—
” Beale said. “That is, the word
literally
, well, it literally
means—
well, instru
men
talist. I mean, you're a—”

“Excuse me,” Shapiro said. “I've got to…get to a phone.”

Shapiro fled into a system of corridors and polyp-like lobbies or reception rooms. Oh, to be alone! The men's room? Maybe not. Well, actually, there was a phone booth. Shapiro sat down inside it, shutting himself into an oceanic silence. Beyond the glass wall people floated by—huge, serene, assured, like exhibits. Shapiro leaned against the wall. He rested his hand on the phone as though it were the hand of an old lover. Absently, he stroked the receiver, then lifted it, releasing a loud electronic jeer—the sound, as silence is not, of emptiness. He would tell Beale that he was unwell, that he had to go rest.

Shapiro paused at the entrance to the restaurant. Beale was sitting at the table alone, his narrow shoulders hunched and his spaceship head bent over the tape recorder as he spoke into it. There was urgency in Beale's posture, and his face was anguished. What could he be saying? Shapiro took a step closer.

“Ah!” Beale said, clicking off the machine with a bright smile, as though he'd been apprehended in some mild debauchery. “Get through?”

“Excuse me?” Shapiro said.

“Get your call through?”

“Oh,” Shapiro said. He sat down and passed his hands across his face. “No.”

“No,” Beale agreed with unfocussed sympathy. “Oh, it's all so difficult.
So
difficult. Now—” He smiled sentimentally. Amazingly, he appeared to have completely forgotten he'd been in the process of attacking Shapiro. “Not to worry—we're going to get a very nice little segment about you. In fact”—he twinkled slyly—“I've already done something by way of an intro. Your name and so on, you're down here for the festival, you'll be playing the García-Gutiérrez…Hmm.” He removed his glasses to study a crumpled piece of paper. “And, let's see.” He turned on the machine and spoke into it again. “You've played the piece before with great success…Mr. Shapiro, I understand.” He nodded encouragingly and indicated the machine.

Shapiro looked at it. “Yes,” he said, wearily.

Beale gave him a wounded glance. “In fact, you premièred the piece in the U.S., I believe.”

Shapiro closed his eyes.

“Yes,” Beale said. He took a deep breath through his nose. “Well,
any
how, that was back in, let's see…nineteen…goodness me! You must be very fond of it.”

“Well,” Shapiro said, “I mean, it
is
in my repertory…”

Beale emitted a giggle, or hiccup. “I have a set of little spoons,” he said. “Tiny little silver things. For olives or something of the sort, that someone gave a great-aunt of mine as a wedding present. And somehow
I've
ended up with them.”

Shapiro opened his eyes and looked at Beale.

“Well, I don't throw them out, I mean, do I?” Beale said. “I say.” He frowned. “Are you not going to…?” He waved at Shapiro's plate.

“No, no,” Shapiro said. “Go ahead. Please.”

“Thank you.” Beale switched off the tape recorder and placed Shapiro's full plate on top of his own empty one. “We'll go on in a minute. And I think we'll get something nice, don't you? Most people like doing radio. It's a lovely medium, lovely. Do you know what I especially like about it?” He interrupted himself to eat, then continued. “One meets people. Oh, I know one does in any profession—it can hardly be avoided. But I mean one
goes out
to meet people, on an equal basis. The voice—it's freeing, wouldn't you agree? Yet intimate. There one is, a great glob of…oh…pork pie!” His eyes gleamed briefly with lust. “But I mean all one's qualities and circumstances just…globbed together, if you see what I mean. The good, the bad, the…pointless…” He paused again, and rapidly forked food into his mouth. “But with radio, you see, there's a way to separate out the real bit. And all the rest of it—I mean one's body, one's face, one's age…even, even”—he glanced around as though bewildered—“even the place where one is sitting! Well, one is free of it, isn't one? One sees how free one really is.

“Great
leaps
. Teleportation. The world is so
…roomy
. So full of oddments. But there's that now-you-see-it, now-you-don't quality about life that makes one so very nervous. Danger, as you pointed out just now, yourself. Danger simply everywhere. Everything destroyed, lost, forgotten…Well, that's what they want, you know, most of them. ‘
There's nothing about it in the reports
,' they'll tell you. They'll say it straight to your face. Of course there are ghosts, people say. I suppose that's some help. But a ghost is simply not terribly
…communicative
. They haunt, they grieve, that sort of thing. But it's all rather general, you see. Because they don't much really talk.

“Oh, didn't you just love it when you were a boy? It's raining outside, your mum's still working in the shop, you haven't a friend in the world, then you turn on the radio, and someone's talking—to
you
. Oh, my darling! Someone is talking to you, and you don't know, before you turn that radio on, who will be there, or what thing they've found to tell you on that very day, at that very moment. Maybe someone will talk to you about cookery. Maybe someone will talk to you about a Cabinet minister. And then that particular thing is
yours
, do you see what I mean? Who
knows
whether it's something worth hearing? Who
knows
whether there's someone out there to hear it! It's a leap of faith, do you see? That both parties are making. Really the most enormous leap of faith.” He paused to devour the food remaining on Shapiro's plate, and then looked helplessly into Shapiro's eyes. “I mean, I find that all enormously, just enormously…” He shook his head and turned away.

 

Shapiro set his alarm for 6 a.m., and slipped out of the hotel before Penwad could come for him, consequences be damned.
Ha-ha—
the day was his! Screechy traffic flew cheerfully through the streets, and toxins gave the air a silvery, fishlike flicker as the sun bobbed aloft on waves of industrial waste.

Shapiro walked and walked. He passed through grand neighborhoods, where armed guards lounged in front of high, white walls. And he passed through poor neighborhoods, where children, bloated with hunger, played in the gutters, their eyes dreamy and wild with drugs. Beyond the surrounding slopes lay the countryside—the gorgeous, blood-drenched countryside.

In some parts of the city Indians congregated on the sidewalk. Some sold chewing gum or trinkets on the corners, some seemed to be living the busy and inscrutable life of the homeless. Their clothing was filthy and tattered, but glorious nonetheless, Shapiro thought, glorious, noble, celebratory—like the banners of an army in rout.

Shapiro considered them with terror. The destitute. People who were almost invisible, almost inaudible. People to whom almost anything could be done:
other
people. At home, in the last five or ten years they had encamped in Shapiro's neighborhood. At first he thought of them as a small and temporary phenomenon. But now they were everywhere—sleeping in parks or on the pavement, ranging through the city night and day, hungry and diseased, in ragged suits and dresses acquired in some other life.

Everyone had become used to them; no one remembered how shocking it had been only a few years earlier to see someone curled up in a doorway, barefoot in freezing temperatures. Most of the time they were just a group at the periphery of Shapiro's vision. But when a student failed to show up for a lesson, or no concert work materialized, or the price of the newspaper went up, or some unexpected expense arose, Shapiro's precious hands would tingle. Injury? Arthritis? Even as it was, daily life was beginning to eat away at Shapiro's small savings. And at such times Shapiro would see those
other
people with an individualized and frigid clarity, would search their faces for proof that each was in some reliable way different from him, as though he were a dying man approaching the gauzy crowds waiting for judgment.

And they—what were they seeing? Perhaps he and his kind seemed a ghostly population to
them—
distant, fading…Perhaps at some terrible border you'd simply leave behind everything that you now considered life, forget about once precious concerns, as though they were worn-out shirts or last year's calendar or old lists of things that long ago it had seemed important to accomplish.

Oh, it was probably true, as Caroline had sometimes said, that his fears were irrational. That he'd always find some way to manage. But when the door closed behind her that day he ought to have understood—yes, he thought, that was the moment he ought to have understood—that success, the sort of success Penwad's letter seemed to promise for him again, was something he could just, finally, forget about.

But he had understood nothing; he'd simply sat there numb—for hours—until Lady Chatterley threw herself forward in a frenzy of carpet shredding. “Stop that,” he'd said. “Stop, O.K., please?” He'd flicked a finger at her rear, and she'd leapt, snarling. The truth was he had always been a little afraid of the cat. She was Caroline's, but Jim, evidently, was allergic.

Shapiro supposed that, to whatever extent Caroline was thinking about
him
, she would be imagining him in debonair company here, taking part in animated and witty conversations of a sort no living person had ever experienced. Shapiro felt short of breath, as though Caroline were suffocating him with a pillow. “This is a wonderful opportunity for Aaron,” she could be assuring Jim at this very instant. “Really it is.” Oh, yes.
He
, Shapiro, must be happy so she could be.

An Indian child playing nearby in the street skinned a knee and howled for his mother. Shapiro felt an almost uncontainable sorrow, as though he were just about to cry himself. But to cry it's necessary to imagine the comforter.

Caroline had never cared what things were really like. He'd once overheard her saying thank you to a recorded message. Everything was nice, pleasant, good. If he spoke truthfully to her, she couldn't hear him. She despised no one. Those who were not nice, pleasant, happy simply ceased to exist.

Shapiro was ravenous. He entered an inviting little restaurant. Inside, it was very dark, but low-hanging, green-shaded lamps made a pool of light over each table.

The waiter spoke no English, but was agreeable when Shapiro pointed at a nearby diner's plate of soup. But there had been a time—truly there had—when Caroline actually loved him, had been fascinated by him, not just by his reputation. For a moment he saw her distinctly. She stood holding Lady Chatterley, gazing into space with a baffled sorrow. “Caroline—” he said.

Had he spoken aloud? Three men at a neighboring table were staring at him with a volatile blend of loathing and amusement. All three were mammoth. One appeared to be a North American; he and one of the others wore pistols, visible even in the restaurant's pleasant gloom, beneath their shirttails.

The waiter, bearing soup, interposed himself; Shapiro gestured fervent thanks. He took a spoonful of the soup. It was clear, and delicious.
Food
, he thought.

Plus rent. Plus utilities…Yes, tonight the stage of a concert hall, a tuxedo. A party, champagne, adulation. But tomorrow it was back to cat fur.

The waiter arrived with a second plate for him, huge and unexpected. A pretty selection of things that seemed to have been cooked in the broth. Mmm. Shapiro leaned into the light of his hanging lamp to poke around at it—carrots, onions, white beans, cabbage, celery, a small…haunch, something that looked…like…a snout…

One of the men at the next table chuckled softly. Shapiro glanced at them involuntarily again, and they stared back, their faces framing the teardrop of light from their hanging lamp. Then one of them, still staring, reached up and unscrewed the bulb.

 

The enfeebled musicians threw themselves on García-Gutiérrez's last, idiotic, triumphal chord. What had happened? Shapiro felt as though he'd awakened to find himself squatting naked in a glade, blinking up at a chortling TV crew that had just filmed him gnawing a huge bone. Had he played well or badly? He hardly knew. He'd played in a frenzy—the banal sonorities, the trivial purposes, the trashy approximations of treasures forged in the inferno of other composers' souls. Lacerating ribbons of notes streamed from his hands as he tried to flog something out of the piece, but it had simply sat there over them all—a great, indestructible, affirming block of suet.