The Facades: A Novel (16 page)

I finally made it in, patronized the urinal, pulled the old-fashioned handle flush. On the way out, elbowing through the press
of anxious faces in the narrow Castrato Hall, who should I come across but Herr Huber. He wore a blue wool suit that was threadbare
at the knees and elbows. Huber avoided my eye and stroked his mustache nervously. I muscled through the line, ignoring protests,
and grabbed his arm. The old music teacher was shaking. He attempted a few feigned pleasantries in his broken English.

“It’s her out there,” I said.

Herr Huber didn’t respond; his trembling was noncommittal. I took his other arm and pinned him to the wall, under a large
portrait of Farinelli.

“It’s her, playing der Hauptmann,” I said. “And your wife knew about it all along. Your wife trained my wife as a tenor. Transformed
her. Helped her to disappear—from me. Tell me I’m wrong, Herr Huber.”

There were murmurs of objection behind me, along with some weak attempts to disattach me from the aging Herr. The German stared
at me with deep-set, bulging eyes, and I could see the strain his anatomy was under, the brisk pumping of an artery in his
neck. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in desperate pantomime.

“You understand me perfectly well,” I said. “Your wife helped my wife disappear. She helped her to change her voice. She arranged
her new identity. Now Molly is Molloy, this man, this Hauptmann. Molly ist der Hauptmann. Tell me I’m wrong, Herr Huber.”

“I don’t understand,” Herr Huber said.

“What I don’t understand,” I replied, “is why everybody keeps lying to me.”

“
Was ist los?
” a deep voice inquired.

“
Seine Frau ist verschwunden
,” said another baritone voice. “
Und jetzt ist er verrückt
.”

“Let me go, please,” Herr Huber said. Unconsciously I’d taken hold of his collar and tightened it around his neck. I knew
that I would learn nothing more from Herr Huber, but at the same time, I couldn’t let go. The frayed collar of his jacket
was the closest I had come to the truth. I clung to it and stared at him furiously, until several capable hands grabbed me
from behind.

“You’ve lost your act three privileges, buddy,” the hand-rubbing usher said. He clamped my arms into his grip. “But don’t
worry, I’ll tell you what happens.” He lowered his voice and smiled. “He kills the bitch.”

Two ushers carried me from Castrato Hall, down from the balcony on the grand staircase. The surplus army cloth rustled on
either side of me. I didn’t kick or struggle excessively as they
manhandled me, recouping some sense of embarrassed civility now that it was too late. A crowd had gathered in the lower lobby.
I knew many of these people, though it had been a year since I’d seen them. There was Andreas Gutenberg’s wife and the assistant
conductor, Gehrens. There was the stage manager and her husband, who’d had us over to dinner at their house a couple of times,
years ago, and whose names had rubbed away. They looked at me with pity and a barely concealed delight, their necklaces and
gold watches gleaming. I rode down on the guards’ arms, between the gargoyles. There was Frau Huber standing by the dessert
table. “Mathilde!” I cried, reaching for a first name that hadn’t crossed my lips in years. “I know everything! I see it all
now!” She held a large untouched slice of chocolate cake and wiped her eyes with her napkin. I could not look at them anymore,
these sympathizers. I turned my eyes to the ceiling, which Bernhard had so beautifully restored. I counted the ferried dead
as they took their journey of forgetting across the ceiling, until the ceiling turned to sky, and I was back out under the
stars.

A
FTER THE CLOSE
of act three and the halfhearted applause, which I heard through the ducts, the lanky tenor appeared at the stage door. Molloy
exited the property quietly, taking only one backward glance at the scene under the marquee, Ariel Perloff preening in an
ambush of photo bulbs. He crossed the street, heading for the network of alleys that led through the old plazas. Molloy stuck
his hands in the pockets of his coat—he walked with linear, masculine impatience, with no trace of Molly’s pendulant, fluid
walk. Had he been practicing this, I wondered?
Molloy kept pace with his shadow, projected along the back walls of old brick warehouses. The shadow seemed to lead him along;
he was leashed to it. We passed a boarded cinema that had once shown foreign films, and then had a second life showing foreign
softcore films, and finally a third life showing hardcore films, before it went out of business. The boards made it look ashamed,
overcome by a final, improbable modesty.

When Molloy reached the plaza, he stopped suddenly and looked both ways before turning back to face me. A yellow streetlight
outlined his lanky body and projected an even thinner duplicate across the cobblestones. I tried to hide against a brick wall
imprinted with the slogan
PERLOFF IRON ORE IS OK
, but Molloy had seen me.

“Simon?” Molloy said, his voice sounding hoarse, desolate, small.

“Molly?” I replied, stepping forward.

The thin tenor stepped forward to scrutinize me. As he approached, I was confronted by a set of deep blue eyes, an unfamiliar
jawline, a superfluous mole. I was forced to admit, here at close range, that my myopia had helped to forge a Molly out of
the redheaded blur playing Hauptmann in the Opera House.

“
You’re
Simon?” the tenor repeated, looking hugely disappointed.

“It’s Sven,” I said.

He looked me over again and shrugged. “I was meeting a blind date.”

“He could still show up,” I said. “Maybe he’s just late.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” Molloy said, kicking a stone across the square. His lifted foot was shod in an adolescent’s canvas
sneaker. The momentum of the kick spun him around, and he
spiraled closer to me, looking me up and down again as he did so. “I know you from somewhere,” he said.

“Remember Molly Norberg?” I asked.

“Good God,” he said. “You’re the husband. Of course.” Molloy took a few steps away, veered around a dried-up fountain.

“I thought she was you,” I said. “I thought she had become you.”

“You must have had pretty bad seats,” Molloy replied.

“Yeah, and I forgot my opera glasses.”

“You didn’t miss much—tonight anyway,” Molloy said. He scanned the square a final time for his absentee blind date. “Well,”
said Molloy, “he isn’t coming. I should sing a fucking aria about it. Walk me partway home, will you?”

He led me down another short alley back to Oracle Avenue. The traffic was thinning out as opera patrons made their exits from
downtown onto I-99. Overhead, the Oracle’s grinning image wavered in tangerine, teal, chartreuse.

We walked toward the river. Everything had closed up, in this part of town, except for a check cashing outlet and some so-called
chop suey stands. A couple of urban decay tourists clacked past in a horse-drawn carriage, shaking their heads. We stopped
in front of a closed-down department store. It had had an earlier incarnation as one of three Wagnerian appreciation cults
that had thrived in fin de siècle Trude. In another life, I could have been the secretary here. The urgent banners of a clearance
sale still dangled from the rafters. The lights were on. Mannequins held the window display, a proud line of blank torsos
and whisk heads.

Molloy slumped down under an
EVERYTHING MUST GO
sign. “I could use a cigarette,” he said.

“Isn’t it bad for your voice?” I asked, handing him one.

He shrugged. “Gives it some edge, some texture.”

We sat quietly for a moment in the store’s bargain afterglow.

“Did you know Molly well?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” Molloy replied. “Although she did fill in for me once, last season. You must have heard about it. I was
singing the part of Don Ottavio in
Don Giovanni
. My partner at the time … well, he was also the understudy, and we kind of gave each other this cold.” He smiled. “So she
had the chance to display her marvelous range.” Molloy pulled on his cigarette, the tobacco crackling. “And everyone, of course,
was thrilled with it, with her. Molly, Molloy, what’s the difference, they said. She had a way of leeching the spotlight,
your wife. But very gracefully. Most people didn’t mind in the end.”

Molloy finished his cigarette and began walking toward the river again. His stride was long. I had to jog a little to catch
up to him. “The kind of talent she had, it was sort of superhuman,” he said. “It made people like Ariel Perloff look … well,
your wife’s voice exposed them. It exposed mediocrity.” In the distance a siren sounded, and Molloy’s attention seemed to
drift in its direction for a moment. He paused to consider his words carefully before going on. “The Perloffs, I mean the
baron and baroness, really didn’t care for your wife,” he said. “Here’s an accomplished mezzo, late thirties, still in her
prime, never misses a show. A genuine coloratura mezzo who can sing roles on either side of her true range. It really looked
like Ariel was going to be an understudy for life. And rightly so. I mean, you heard her tonight. Part of me wanted to go
over there and push her offstage myself.”

“Do you think they did it?” I asked.

“The Perloffs?” asked Molloy. “Well, I don’t know.
Did it
, that’s a bit strong. Not that they aren’t capable of such crude jobs. They pay off a few cops, send out one of their ‘employees.’
A name like theirs goes a long way in this town. But Molly? No, their approach to her had to be somewhat different. She was,
certainly, under a great deal of pressure right before she disappeared.”

We fell silent as we reached the old granaries along the Gertrude River. The abandoned mansions of industrialists hung over
the water, some simply boarded up, others half-destroyed by fire, their charred frames resembling the ink-stained fingers
of clutching hands. It was impossible now to recapture the hope these whiskered men must have felt, gazing down at the river
from their windows at night. As it turned out, the river itself had proved to be their undoing—its tendency to dwindle during
drought years, blocking the arteries of commerce. At these times, the Gertrude was a mere stream, and the struts of the Gertrude
Bridge looked like the obscenely exposed legs of a skinny girl wearing ankle socks. The Gertrude Bridge was the official suicide
bridge of Trude. It had been named after Gertrude Grunewald, née Trudenhauser, the mayor’s daughter, who had been the first
to avail herself of this bridge. She had jumped to escape her husband, a salt magnate who turned brutal after his mine collapsed
in 1897. Mayor Trudenhauser, who had advocated the marriage, was overcome with remorse, and from the depths of his grief he
pushed through a strange piece of legislation that has made Trude a suicide destination to this day. The law, passed by a
glum city council in the post-Exhibition days of 1899, stated that any citizen choosing to end his or her life on the Gertrude
Bridge would be memorialized by a small bronze plaque. “It may be some consolation to these desperate
souls,” Trudenhauser famously remarked, “to know that our city will remember them.” Many lawmakers have attempted to reverse
the statute over the years; however, they have never succeeded, on account of Trude’s large and surprisingly well-organized
Gertrude Bridge Group—the most diverse and effective suicide lobby in the Midwest.

As Molloy and I approached the bridge, over a century after Gertrude’s death, the names covered both sides, the undersides
of the arches, even the sidewalks themselves. The gauche, unillustrious names of my fellow Midwesterners, the Hanks and Trishes,
the Patties, the Dougs. With the river as high as it was that night, some of the plaques were submerged, as if they too had
jumped, unable to bear the light of the moon. Those above the waterline were reflected in a wobbling scrawl on the river.
The Gertrude carried broken branches, pop cans, and dead fish. Beneath the surface, sluggish carp twisted through her soft
and murky depths. It was no fait accompli to jump from the Gertrude Bridge—for every finished name on the bridge, there were
two who’d failed, who’d leapt at the wrong angle or at the wrong time of day, when the Trude police trawler was on the water.
How horrifying to be sucked back out of that cushioning sediment among the carp and the pop cans and cigarette butts like
the one I now dropped to flutter and hiss out, pulled back to life.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“You sang very well tonight,” I said.

“Thank you,” Molloy said. He smiled. “That’s sweet of you.”

The red-light district, with its strip clubs, all-night bars, and massage parlors, was across the Gertrude. Molloy was heading
toward those lights, which bleated from far away. He extended his slender, manicured hand. “Thank you for being my blind date,”
he said. “And I’m terribly sorry for your …” He fumbled for the right word. “I really am sorry.” He glided off over the plaques
of the dead, fading into the distance—he became a smudge, a smear, blending at last into the roseate glow of the west bank.
With nowhere to go, no one to look for, I stumbled around reading them. Irrationally I began to scour the bridge for Molly’s
name, as if she might have jumped here without me or anyone else knowing. But I found no Mollys. Her name echoed through my
mind like a foghorn, plangent and hollow. Molloy was completely gone now. There was no one else on the bridge. There was no
one inhabiting the merchants’ mansions. I was ideally placed, I thought. I stared down into the muddy depths of the Gertrude,
where so many of my fellow townspeople had taken their rest. I imagined the sediment’s soft embrace, wedging the toe of my
dress shoe into the stone railing. Only the thought of my name on a plaque dissuaded me in the end.

S
OME WEEKS LATER
I
RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM
B
OB
L
ILLY
stating that my son had been accepted into college on early admission and wanted to see me to share the good news. This was
a lie—the part about him wanting to see me, anyway—but that didn’t surprise me, coming from Bob Lilly, who withheld the name
and location of the notorious “college.” We’d agreed to meet at the Traumhaus so that Kyle could see his grandmother at the
same time, but when Lilly failed to appear at the agreed-upon 5:30, Mom started fretting about her place at the dinner table
and I figured it was just as well to let her go. I led her up the hill from the pond where we’d been feeding the new ducks,
who looked for all purposes like a perfect family, though I worried for the ducklings in their obedient line. The Traumhaus
dining room was on a cantilevered porch, a floating mirage of candlelit fellowship on the hillside. The early arrivals were
already taking their places at long lacquered tables. I sent Mom upstairs, watched her fade into that patterned brightness.
She wouldn’t have had much to say to him anyway, with only a few rags of language to her name.

I returned to the parking lot to wait. Lilly’s van was indistinguishable at first from the other shadows encroaching on the
Traumhaus garden. A slight wind began to blow the birches and the oaks, whose last tenacious leaves were falling to the gray
earth. After some whispered counsel from Lilly, my son disembarked from the kidnapper van. Kyle had grown at least a foot,
it seemed. He wore a corduroy blazer with wide pointed lapels that might have belonged to Lilly. A straight black tie dangled
from his collar. Striding forward with the swagger of a car salesman, he reached for my hand.

“Dad,” he said, crushing me in his grip.

“Son.”

Lilly must have gotten him something helpful for his face. The roughness and pox I remembered, and had come to love, had given
way to an innocuous zit or two and some minor shaving damage.

“You look great, kid,” I said, resisting the urge to trace the old psoriasis scars with my finger. He didn’t return the compliment,
not that he honestly could have. I knew how I looked. We walked up to the Traumhaus lobby, passed under the doubtful eye of
the sentry, and continued through the back door. There were a few other visitors and residents strolling through the sculpture
park. This inner courtyard of the Traumhaus was superbly groomed. Maintenance guys in gray shirts were out salting the paths.
It was an astringent Midwestern March evening, the kind of night that gathers power from the vast blanknesses of the plains.
Flurries wheeled through the garden, pushed by a slight breeze. We walked the tended pathways.

The sculpture park had been constructed in the spring, summer, and autumn of 1983. By then Bernhard had already
moved into the Schreber Suite to begin his last decline. Creative struggles over the park, for which he had commissioned twenty-nine
site-specific pieces, consumed his final summer and accelerated his illness. A series of photographs in the front lobby showed
the architect donning V-neck sweaters and collar-heavy polyester shirts, in postures of tense détente with the sculptors on
his payroll. It was all supposed to resemble
ein andere Welt
, another world. I walked alongside my son, past the same massive sculptures that had dwarfed the architect in photographs.
Big steel slabs jutted out of the earth, painted the pinks and aquamarines of early 1980s avant-garde. Nearby, a circle of
rusted ballistics evoked a prayer circle of some defunct and giant race. Kyle glanced sideways at the sculptures as he passed.
He wanted to get through the space, through the conversation. A ten-foot marble eyeball observed us through its cloudy pupil.

“Do you still have your marbles?” I asked.

He laughed, rolling his eyes up toward the clouded sky. I noted the transformation in my son, from the easygoing, confident
adult he’d resembled minutes ago to the sullen teen he became by default in my presence. He slouched his shoulders to indicate
his dismay at being with me, crumpling himself up inside the corduroy blazer. As we walked, and I tried to think of what to
say, I became aware of a flickering presence behind us. It was no more than a thought at first, a servant of the encroaching
dusk. Something disturbed the edge of my vision.

“So I suppose Bob told you,” Kyle said.

“Told me what?” I asked.

“About bible college.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”

We followed a suggestion in the grass—not so much a formal
path as a rubbed consensus—around two pools of half-frozen water that encased a few balled leaves. Evening had crept over
the garden, weaning the sculptures to their silhouettes. A bare slope led down to the cracked and netless tennis courts. On
the edge of the hill stood a large work in bronze and graphite; the sculptor had titled it
Adolescence
. It was a giant hand jutting from the hill in a gesture of salutation or affront. The thick wrist looked rooted in the hillside.
Kyle stepped closer, gazed at the daunting fingers, the gnarled trunk-like wrist. In the shadow of the powerful hand, Kyle
supplied me with details of the college, its supposedly rich tradition of evangelical and charity work. It was two hundred
miles away in a cornfield. I pictured a row of old brick dormitories, an avenue of oaks. To visit him there, I would have
to drive long hours down interstates bordered by neon crosses on one side, neon adult video stores on the other, roads otherwise
dark and devoid of comfort.

“Bob Lilly,” I asked, “is an alumnus?”

“Yeah.” Kyle considered the vacant tennis courts. “He wrote me a recommendation.”

On closer inspection, the sculpted hand was a detailed, even meticulous work of realism. Its nails were dirty, it had unruly
bronze cuticles and a horizontal cut along the knuckle of its ring finger.

“I didn’t expect you to approve or anything,” Kyle said.

“I do approve, I do approve,” I said. “I couldn’t be happier. Now do you still want to go?”

He scoffed. “Bob didn’t even want me to come here,” he said under his breath, but the garden was so still, I had no trouble
hearing him. “I thought it would be the adult thing to do.”

“What do you know about adulthood?” I asked. I leaned
over, managed to get a smoke lit sheltered by the hand, then stayed choking on it for a moment. “Seriously, you don’t know
shit, and you should be glad. It’s a long, slow process of losing everything that matters to you.”

His reply was spoken in a harsh, throaty rasp. “That’s what happens when you worship a human being, Dad.” He shook his head
fiercely and took two hard breaths. He retreated behind the hand, tracing his fingers along the metal, and as he disappeared
I had an inopportune memory of a hide-and-seek game we’d played years before. When he spoke again his voice was disembodied,
it was as if the hand was speaking to me.

“It shouldn’t have surprised you,” Kyle said, through the hand. “You were there. You heard her, just like I did.”

“Heard what?” In fact I did hear something, a rustling movement in the shrubbery behind us. At the distant Traumhaus, the
first lights were coming on: a cone of lamp in the Robert Walser Room, TV in the Wittgenstein Lounge. Pale lights, muted and
austere.

“You heard her crying,” Kyle said. “You heard Mom crying, every night.”

His eyes blazed from the dark as he emerged. Now that he was out in the open, facing me, I looked away, staring up at the
fourth floor of the Traumhaus, the bright windows of the exalted Schreber Suite. I wondered how the occupant of that suite
would describe the indistinct and distant world below, from such a solitude and such a height. The starved world of scrawled
trees and tiny dot-like beings could resolve itself into a single letter,
S
, which signified pain, or simply feeling, or the first letter of a name.
S
could not help me now. I knew as well as Kyle that tonight was the kind of night that made Molly cry.
I used to search for my wife
, I thought.
I used to search for my wife every night downtown
.

“I’ll pray for you, Dad,” Kyle said, walking into the Traumhaus’s shrouded glow. In the parking lot, the gray van coughed
to life, its headlights flashed on, and it pulled to the curb for him. There was no question of intervening this time. The
best and most dignified thing I could do was nothing. Lilly got out of the van and I watched their two forms converge for
a hug in the dusk. Kyle’s kind and charitable guardian turned to give me one last look, in which his kindness and charity
were suppressed. An utterly neutral stare directed both at me and the bronze hand behind me, without any distinction of these
two objects in his visual field. I watched the two passengers climb into the van and turn toward the I-99 frontage road. It
was the last time I saw Kyle for several years. The next time I saw him was on television, preaching; by that time, of course,
he had changed his name to Lilly.

A
FTER HIS DEPARTURE
the sculpture garden was silent. I sat down under the hand, which was, I thought, useless, unpartnered, incapable of prayer.
I sat numbly in its shadow for a period of time, until the malingerer I’d sensed all along emerged at last. He wore his frayed
pink bathrobe, grubby opaque slippers, and the remains of a sweater.

“I smell cigarettes,” he said.

I handed him one and asked how he’d managed to get away.

“My memoir put the orderly to sleep, again.” Vollstrom grinned. “Of course, that’s the paradox of our memoir-writing regimen
here: there’s nothing to write about.”

“You’re going to catch pneumonia,” I said.

“Hopefully!” Vollstrom exclaimed, lighting his cigarette
with a damp match. “Pneumonia has always struck me as a lovely flower of disease.”

“I think my wife left me,” I said. I could hardly say what compelled me to speak or where the words had come from. They exited
my mouth softly, leaving no imprint except for the evanescent steam of my breath. The moment I spoke these words I wanted
to grab them back, bury them deep in the earth where no one would find them. How could I recover from this admission?
It was me, the gray man
—I was dizzy, my chest throbbed as if I’d been beaten. I squeezed my eyes shut and through the burning saltiness saw the image
of Molly in the sunlight, laughing and smiling at me. She extended her hand to my cheek.

I felt a leathery hand on my shoulder. It was Vollstrom’s. “Congratulations!” he said, flashing his yellow teeth. “Now you
will almost certainly be admitted here, and you already have a subject for your memoir. Few can say as much. With some luck
and competent judging, I’d expect you to make the Klaus Mann Chamber within a year or two. You could even be a potential candidate
for the Schreber, the Schreber is by no means beyond the realm of possibility.”

“That is not my ambition,” I said. “I want to get out of this place.”

“Leave Trude!” Vollstrom had a good laugh at this. His laugh turned to a cough and he spat a sallow chunk of lung into the
snow, his white legs shaking. “But that’s impossible,” he said.

“It was possible for my wife. She got out somehow.”

“Well of course! For some it’s possible. But for certain souls, souls like yours or mine … or Bernhard’s. Look at Bernhard,
the exile’s exile. Look around you at the high moderne castle
he built for himself. Clearly such an individual could never leave Trude, despite the vitriol he spouted against it in his
later years. Yes indeed, despite everything he said, Bernhard was what you call a
homebody
.” Vollstrom began to laugh again and asked me for another cigarette. “You’re sitting on his grave, by the way.”

To Vollstrom’s great amusement I moved some snow with my feet and revealed a small recessed stone. Its inscription was barely
legible in the faint light:

KLAUS BERNHARD (1909–1983)

HE ATTEMPTED TO CREATE A WORLD HE COULD LIVE IN

“Don’t worry, he loved the idea that people would be walking all over his grave, sitting on his grave,” Vollstrom said. “I
don’t think you realize what a funny guy he was.”

Then Vollstrom, who was one of the last original inductees to the Traumhaus, began to tell me the story of the architect’s
last days. I will record it as accurately as I can on the stiff keys of this manual typewriter, from these heights of estrangement.
The pond and the ducklings are far below. These days I can hardly remember how it felt to have a wife and son—to be a family
man, as they say. There is no question that Vollstrom’s story was highly dubious, but he was there to witness Bernhard’s death
first hand, and the probable inaccuracy of his account does not mean that it is without value, exactly. He spoke slowly between
drags on his cigarette, which he neglected for long stretches. It shed small wads of ash onto Bernhard’s grave.

By the winter of 1983 the architect was in terrible health, Vollstrom began amid the falling flurries. The winter of 1983
was one of the coldest on record. The roads to the Traumhaus were
blocked, and the orderlies had to go out in snowshoes to retrieve the necessary supplies. In the Schreber Suite Bernhard lay
dying. Years of prescription drug abuse had left him yellow and nephritic. He was exuding an unbearable stench, the stench
of someone who is rotting from within. There was a brutal irony in this, Vollstrom noted, which Bernhard himself might have
appreciated in a better mood. The architect who had been reluctant to install bathrooms in his buildings, where visitors might
expel their wastes, was now being killed by his own, which were trapped inside him and poisoning him, creating such a horrible
odor that no one could stand to be near him for very long. The architect was entirely alone in the Schreber Suite. He was
feverish and hallucinating. From his isolated penthouse, Bernhard ranted incessantly. He cried that he was freezing solid,
that his right hand had broken off and had fallen in his lap. My blood is hardening, turning to ice, the architect cried,
according to Vollstrom. He began a long diatribe against the city of Trude. This city will never amount to anything, he cried
from his stinking chair. It is only right that most people see this city from the air—as a distant grid it is much more beautiful
and appealing, whereas on the ground it is full of mediocrities who long to see their paralysis reflected and magnified in
the city around them. Trude teems with such mediocre people, they cannot imagine in their wildest dreams a better life, they
are enthralled by their own aura of failure, they would actually feel uncomfortable if their city became a desirable place
to live. They want to prevent any kind of excitement, any artistic accomplishments beyond the familiar, they are terribly
afraid of foreigners, their nepotism is nauseating. They cast aspersion on anyone who might enhance their quality of life,
who might enrich the city where they live and make it desirable, when they see a work of
beauty they are immediately suspicious and hostile, they hate the person who has challenged the morass in which they so comfortably
reside, these middlers in the middle …
das Mittel … mein mall!
My mall! Look what they did to my mall! It’s killing me! Bernhard lapsed in and out of his native language as he spoke to
no one in particular from the Schreber Suite. To the patients who were forced to listen through their walls, understanding
nothing, Bernhard’s rant was at times reminiscent of atonal song.
Ich sterrrbbe
, he half-sang. I’m dyyy-ing, he cried in his surprisingly rich baritone, which resounded through the asylum. One might even
credit the rants of the dying architect with a strange beauty, Vollstrom said in one of his more charitable moments, tapping
ash on the grave.