The Blazing World (48 page)

You know, a normal person doesn’t do those things. A normal person doesn’t say, “Maybe I pushed my father to his death,” and then, “Maybe my mother molested me,” and then destroy his sister’s apartment. I kept saying to myself,
My brother must be out of his mind
. Without Jim, I don’t know what I would have done. Jim and I got married sooner than we had thought we would because I didn’t want to stay in that place anymore. We didn’t tell Rune, and he didn’t call or write to apologize or anything. My own brother scared me. Of course, I found out that he had gone back to New York and plunged into his art again. Things went really well for him, but without the Internet I wouldn’t have known. My friends here in Minneapolis aren’t keeping track of artists in New York City. I know he was famous, but he wasn’t famous out here.

Hess: You weren’t in touch with Rune?

Smith: No, not for years, not until September 11, when I panicked. I called his gallery, that’s how I was finally able to reach him. Nothing really mattered to me then, except knowing that he was all right. He was the only family I had in the world, except Jim and the kids. We started calling each other once in a while, and eventually I asked him about the awful things he had said. It’s hard to explain how terrible it is to have those ideas in your mind, even if you don’t believe them. It pollutes your thinking. Someone comes along and throws dirt into your head, and you can’t clean it out. He said he had lied to hurt me and that sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. He liked to be outrageous just for the heck of it.

Hess: But you didn’t visit each other?

Smith: No, Jim didn’t want him near the kids. I had to respect that, and the truth is, after that terrible day, Rune made me nervous, too. I wasn’t sure of him anymore.

Hess: I have to ask if he ever mentioned Harriet Burden to you.

Smith: Yes, a couple of times. At first I thought he was talking about a man, but then I realized Harry was a woman. He told me he was cooking up something with her.

Hess: Those were his exact words?

Smith: Well, I don’t know if those were his exact words; something like that.

Hess: Anything else?

Smith: He seemed to be enjoying himself, and he thought she was refined.
Refined
was a big word in Rune’s vocabulary. He said she was really smart and had read a lot and they had things in common. I don’t think there was anything else.

Hess: He didn’t say what they had in common?

Smith: No. You explained to me that he might have stolen her work. It sounds awfully complicated to me, and she sounds fairly nutty herself, using those guys to show art that was actually hers, but I just don’t know. He didn’t talk about
Beneath
at all until after the show, and then he sent me some clippings. Listen, I wish I could tell you he confessed everything to me, but I can’t.

Rune and I loved each other as kids and then we grew apart. It wasn’t easy for either of us at home, but was it that bad? I don’t understand what happened to him, why he turned out the way he did. His death was just plain sad, and I don’t really care if he wanted to kill himself or not. He must have known that taking those pills was dangerous, that he might kill himself if it went wrong. After all, that’s how Mom did it. There are days when the whole story comes rushing over me, and I get pretty low. I try to keep a positive attitude, but it isn’t always easy, and then I just feel like crying. But that’s not every day. And I say to myself, Rune will send my kids to college. The money from his estate will pay for Edward and Kathleen, who never even knew him. Something good will come out of all the sadness.

Harriet Burden

Notebook U

April 9, 2003

My anger is returning, a sweet fury.

He will not get away with this. I have made a vow.

I am leaving messages, sending e-mails. He will not get away with this.

Bruno says: Your philosophies will bury you alive. No one knows what you’re talking about, Harry.

You are all alone with your thoughts.

Today, you accused Dr. F. of not listening. Why? Why did you accuse him? Fierce and caustic you were. Then we talked about it. He is listening. He is always listening to you, and you felt bad, bad again.

April 20, 2003

Four works have vanished from the studio overnight. I am desperate. My windows. It seems impossible, but they are gone. I will look again tomorrow. Perhaps one of the assistants has moved them. No one can get into this building without using supernatural powers. Bruno tells me to remain calm. I must.

(Undated)

I wait for redemption from R.B. And before I sleep, a few notes on the beloveds:

Bruno’s
Confessions
are getting fatter. He himself is growing fatter. Fat old granddad.

Ethan’s story is called “Less Than Me.” I have been wondering what he means by it. His character S wakes up one morning and is somehow different. Some crucial aspect of herself has gone missing, her me-ness, her essence, her soul has fled her body. She doesn’t look any different in the mirror. Her apartment is the same. Her clothes are hanging in the closet. Her cat knows her, and yet, she is certain she is not the same. She begins to behave differently. She is a vegan but finds herself ordering meat dumplings from a Chinese restaurant. She takes a cab to work. She never splurges on cabs. She speaks her mind to a colleague at work. She never speaks her mind, and so forth. She begins to suspect her upstairs neighbor O, whom she has never met, a loose and merry girl with a bright wardrobe and a slew of boyfriends she bangs loudly enough for S to hear the couplings through the ceiling. Ethan doesn’t explain the suspicion. It just happens as it might in a dream, or in a fit of paranoia or a delusion. S spies on O. She keeps tabs on her comings and goings. She follows her in the street. She finds out everything she can about O, her favorite movies, books, shopping habits, but every new clue tells her nothing. Then S decides to build a monument to her lost self, an object that will be all that she is not anymore. She works hard every night after work and finally she finishes “the Thing.” We don’t really know what the Thing looks like, but it is some kind of body with writing and images on it. S invites O for dinner. O arrives, looks at the Thing, and says, Oh, it’s me.
^I

I called up Ethan. I was excited, pleased, wanted to tell him what I thought. We are more than the accumulation of empirical data, I said, more than a heap of recorded trivia, more than our wanderings and our meetings and our jobs, but what is that moreness? Is it what we create between us? Is it a neurological business? Is it the product of narrative, of the imaginary? It’s so interesting, I said. But Ethan was sullen, monosyllabic, said I had no idea what he had meant to say. S and O were signs in an arbitrary game of exchange. I said nothing to that. Then I said we artists mostly don’t know what we’re doing, and he told me not to tell him what he knows or doesn’t know. He never takes off that horrible wool hat. He’s worn it for about a year now, a helmet, really, to hide under. When I said we two seemed to have a headwear theme going in the family, he looked horrified. He does not want to be like his mother. I believe he wanted to rip the hat off immediately, but he is too proud. I don’t know how to reach across the chasm. I do everything wrong.

I did not say a word about it to him. But is it possible Ethan doesn’t know that his “Thing” resembles nothing so much as some of his mother’s artworks?

Aven is my number girl. She is seven, and she tells me her sevens are green. Her threes are yellow. She is my mathematical child, a child for whom the equations glow. The Radish is long forgotten. Maybe I am the only one who thinks of her anymore. My granddaughter has had her hair cut very short—a compromise. She wanted a Mohawk, but her father and mother refused. Hair grows, I, the indulgent grandmother, said to Maisie, but she said, Oscar is afraid she’ll be teased. She’s already strange. And I remembered my girlish strangeness.

You’re still strange, Harry, strange and estranged.

I eagerly await my coming out. It will happen. I am tense with excitement. It shall work. I bid you good night, whoever you are.

May 5, 2003

I believe Rune is the Barometer’s angel. The Barometer has drawn me another image of the intruder he claims he has seen coming and going at night. He likes the phrase
the dead of night
. And then he plays,
Dire night, wee hours, hours of wee and woe, our wee, woeful hours
.
Wee Willie Winkie goes through the town
.
Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown
. We chanted it together. His drawing is of a huge muscular man with wings. When I looked into the Barometer’s eyes as he held out the paper to me, I imagined I was seeing Alan Dudek, the Barometer before he was the Barometer. I thought it was Alan for a moment because his gaze looked unclouded. He has moments of clarity, of a consciousness undiluted by madness. He is part theater, not all theater, but there is a piece of his illness he plays and plays with. This must be acknowledged. After all, we all play parts. We shouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that insane people are incapable of dissimulation. My mad friend has his masks, too, his games and subterfuges to avoid the all-important weekly bath or shower. But he also has access to the rumblings underground, a psychotic gift. He feels what we have suppressed, what we fear but cannot say. Isn’t this a kind of weather we make among us? I have studied the drawing. The longer I look at it, the more it looks like Rune to me. Bruno thinks I have joined the ranks of the mentally ill, that I’m in the grip of a paranoid fantasy.

I used his old name. Alan, I said, did you let him in? Did you let the angel in?

He looked surprised. He dug his nails into the skin above his wrist. I told him to stop scratching and repeated the question. He shook his head and said, He will cut out my brain and boil it for a stew.

Did Rune threaten him?
If you tell, I’ll boil your brain and eat it.
The idea is too vivid for Rune and its expression too precise. Rune’s diction rarely moves beyond the borrowed and the banal because Rune uses words to create a public being that hides what others would hate if they could see it. His language must socialize the treachery beneath. Beneath! The Barometer, on the other hand, is an ambulatory high tide of verbiage, but those waves of words include the occasional oracular insight. The problem is how to extract the prophesy from the verbal flood.

You must complete your
Maskings
without anyone to help you. There is R.B., after all. And there are the others, your several secret other ones.
^II
The game is not over.

I.
Ethan Lord, “Less Than Me,”
The Paradoxical Review
28 (Spring/Summer 2003).

II.
R.B. must refer to Richard Brickman. The question of “others” remains open, but it seems possible, even likely, that Burden published articles under other names in various journals.

Harriet Burden

Notebook O

September 23, 2003

The summer people are gone, and the island is chill and brown with patches of burning reds. The surf frightens me these days, and I keep my distance, staying close to where the beach meets the grasses that bow down in the hard wind. Today it made a noise that made me think of a great hoarse animal calling out to no one in particular. I am alone. I have lost Bruno now, too, lost him to my schemes and my rage and my failure. I wanted to bite the world bloody, but I have bitten myself, made my own poor tragedy of things.