Mao II Read online

  “I’m here to sign my books,” he said.

  Everyone waited as the words traveled across the room, slowly unfolding their meaning.

  “Bring me a pen so I can sign my books already.”

  The guard moved in, not actually looking at the man, who drew back quickly.

  “Watch with the hands. There’s no right that you should touch my person. Just, that’s all, don’t put no hands on me.”

  People saw it was all right to move again. Just another New York moment. The guard followed the man out the revolving door and Scott went out behind them. He was running a little late but wanted to look at the Warhols only a few blocks away. The museum lobby was crowded. He went downstairs, where people moved in nervous searching steps around the paintings. He walked past the electric-chair canvases, the repeated news images of car crashes and movie stars, and he got used to the anxious milling, it seemed entirely right, people eager to be undistracted, ray-gunned by fame and death. Scott had never seen work that was so indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it. The walls looked off to heaven in a marvelous flat-eyed gaze. He stood before a silk screen called Crowd. The image was irregular, deep streaks marking the canvas, and it seemed to him that the crowd itself, the vast mesh of people, was being riven by some fleeting media catastrophe. He moved along and stood finally in a room filled with images of Chairman Mao. Photocopy Mao, silk-screen Mao, wallpaper Mao, synthetic-polymer Mao. A series of silk screens was installed over a broader surface of wallpaper serigraphs, the Chairman’s face a pansy purple here, floating nearly free of its photographic source. Work that was unwitting of history appealed to Scott. He found it liberating. Had he ever realized the deeper meaning of Mao before he saw these pictures? A subway rumbled past in the stony dark nearby. He stood and looked a while longer, feeling a curious calm even with people moving steadily in and out. The surge of bodies made its own soft roar.

  Outside, a woman in a padded jacket followed him down the street. He had the impression she was small, with close-cropped hair, carrying some kind of animal in her coat. He picked up the pace but she kept on him, saying, “You’re from out of town so I can talk to you.”

  He almost turned and looked at her but then thought no.

  Saying, “Don’t be ascared of me, mister, I only want to talk.”

  He walked faster, looking straight ahead, and she was still there, at his shoulder, saying, “I picked your face out of the air as this is someone I can trust.”

  He pointed to a blinking traffic-sign, hoping she’d understand he was pressed for time and this was goodbye and no hard feelings please, but she hurried across the street right behind him and moved alongside as they reached the curbstone. That’s when she tried to give him the animal. He didn’t turn to see what it was. Something dark and sick was his impression. He was almost running now but she kept up, saying, “Take it, mister, take it.” He would listen to her but would not reply and would not let her touch him or give him anything she had touched. He thought of the wrecked man in the bookstore who recoiled when the guard reached for him. Neither side wanted to be touched.

  Saying, “Take it outside the city, where it’s got a chance to live. ”

  When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place. He rode to the eighth-floor lobby of a midtown hotel, an atrium palace in the Broadway ruck, with English ivy hanging off the tiered walkways, with trelliswork and groves of trees, elevators falling softly through the bared interior, a dream that once belonged to freeway cities. He saw her at a table near the bar, an overnight bag and a carrying case on the floor by her chair. She was in her late forties, he figured, with whitish blond hair, thick and rigid, shooting out of a sea-bleached face. Her eyes were light blue, so clear and nearly startling he knew it would take an effort not to stare.

  “You have to be Brita Nilsson.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the look. I don’t know, professional, accomplished, world traveler, slightly apart. Not to mention the camera case. I’m Scott Martineau.”

  “My guide to the frontier.”

  “In fact I got lost several times on my approach to the city and then got rattled by traffic even though it’s only weekend traffic and I finally got straightened out and even found a place to park but there were unsettling moments yet to come, psychic intruders, sort of living shadows, and they speak. I haven’t been to New York in years and wouldn’t mind sitting and chatting a while before we hit the streets. Are you staying here?”

  “Don’t be crazy. I have a place way downtown but I thought it would be simpler to meet somewhere central. It’s very nice to have this opportunity. But you talked about conditions without really specifying. I mean how much time do I get to spend with him? And how long can I expect to be gone because I have a schedule that’s really quite firm and I haven’t, you know, brought days and days of underwear.”

  “Wait. Are we moving?”

  “It’s a revolving bar,” she said.

  “Jesus. Where am I?”

  “Isn’t it strange? New York has fallen.”

  He watched Broadway float into the curved window and felt as if blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted. The misplaced heartland hotel. The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory—words that were part of some synthetic mass language, the esperanto of jet lag. And the tower under construction across the street, webbed and draped against the weather, figures moving fleetly past gaps in the orange sheeting. He saw them clearly now, three or four kids playing on the girders, making the building seem a ruin, an abandonment.

  “I also have to tell you I don’t understand the drill. I would prefer to get there on my own.”

  “Get where? You wouldn’t know where you were going.”

  “You could tell me, couldn’t you?” she said.

  “Bill insists we do it this way.”

  “A little melodramatic maybe?”

  “Bill insists. Besides, we’re very hard to find.”

  “All right. But for the man’s own peace of mind, why not choose a neutral site? That way there’s no problem over disclosure. His whereabouts remain secret.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have very much to disclose. And Bill knows you won’t talk anyway.”

  “How does he know?”

  “We saw the piece about you in Aperture. That’s how we decided you were the one. And he couldn’t meet you somewhere else because he doesn’t go anywhere else, except to hide from the book he’s doing.”

  “I do love his books. They really mattered to me. And he hasn’t been photographed in what? We must be speaking in the multi decades. So why don’t I just relax?”

  “Why don’t you just relax?” Scott said.

  Above the bar area there was a clock rotating in an openwork tower. From the table he could see through the bare trellis and clock framework to the elevators. He thought he could easily sit all afternoon watching the elevators rise and drop, clear pods ringed with pinpoint lighting. They moved soundlessly, clinging to the surface of a vast central cylinder. Everything was moving, everything was slowly turning, there was music coming from somewhere. He watched the people inside the elevators, deftly falling. High up, on the walkways, an occasional figure looking down, head and upper body. He wondered if the thing the woman tried to give him in the street might be a newborn child. The same musical phrase over and over, coming from somewhere.

  “You photograph only writers now.”

  “Only writers. I frankly have a disease called writers. It took me a long time to find out what I wanted to photograph. I came to this country it’s fifteen years. To this city actually. And I roamed the streets first day, taking pictures of city faces, eyes of city people, slashed men, prostitutes, emergency rooms, forget it. I did this for years. Many times I used a wide-angle lens and pressed the shutter release with the camera hanging at my chest from a neck strap so I wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of attention, thank you very much. I followed derelicts practical
ly to their graves. And I used to go to night court just to look at faces. I mean New York, please, this is my official state religion. But after years of this I began to think it was somehow, strangely—not valid. No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the end. Do you know? And so I had to work out for myself certain complicated things that are probably very simple. You reach a certain age, isn’t that the way it works? Then you know what you want to do at last.”

  She was eating roasted nuts from her loosely clenched fist, popping one at a time and drinking peppered vodka.

  “But isn’t it restful here?” he said. “I’m mesmerized by the elevators. It might be a new addiction.”

  “Give me a break,” she said, and her slight accent and the worn-out catch phrase and the formal way she offered it, without crunching the first two words together, made him very happy.

  “Only writers.”

  “Only writers,” she said.

  “And you’re making a record, a kind of census in still pictures.”

  “I will just keep on photographing writers, every one I can reach, novelists, poets, playwrights. I am on the prowl, so to speak. I never stop traveling and taking pictures. This is what I do now. Writers.”

  “Every face.”

  “Every man and woman who is out there and who is reachable. If someone’s not well known, so much the better. Given a choice, I prefer to search out writers who remain obscure. I get tips all the time, I get names and books from editors and other writers who understand what I’m doing or at least they say they do to make me feel better. A planetary record. For me, it’s a form of knowledge and memory. I’m furnishing my own kind of witness. I try to do it systematically, country by country, but there are always problems. Finding some writers is a problem. And there are many writers in prison. This is always a problem. In some cases I’ve received permission to photograph writers under house arrest. People are starting to know me and this helps sometimes.”

  “With authorities.”

  “Yes, and writers. They’re willing to see me because they know I’m simply doing a record. A species count, one writer said. I eliminate technique and personal style to the degree that this is possible. Secretly I know I’m doing certain things to get certain effects. But we ignore this, you and I. I’m four years on this project, which by its nature of course there is no end.”

  “The question is, what happens to Bill’s pictures?”

  “This is completely up to you. I make some pictures available to publishers or the media but only if the writer gives consent. This is how I support the project, along with several grants. I have a travel grant I absolutely depend on. Magazines would do anything to run a photo essay on Bill Gray. But I don’t want to do pictures that make a revelation, that say here he is after all these years. A simple study piece is better. I want to do pictures that are unobtrusive, shy actually. Like a work-in-progress. Not so permanent and finished. Then you look at the contacts and decide what you want me to do with them.”

  “These are the answers we were hoping to get.”

  “Good. So life goes on.”

  “And what happens ultimately to your pictures of writers as a collection?”

  “Ultimately I don’t know. People say some kind of gallery installation. Conceptual art. Thousands of passport-size photos. But I don’t see the point myself. I think this is a basic reference work. It’s just for storing. Put the pictures in the basement of some library. If people want to look, they come and ask. I mean what’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work? I don’t know. But people still want the image, don’t they? The writer’s face is the surface of the work. It’s a clue to the mystery inside. Or is the mystery in the face? Sometimes I think about faces. We all try to read faces. Some faces are better than some books. Or put the pictures in a space capsule, that would be fantastic. Send them into space. Greetings. We are writers of Earth.”

  The elevators climb and fall, the clock rotates, the bar slowly turns, the signs appear once more, the traffic lights change, the yellow taxis come and go. Magno, Minolta, Kirin, Sony, Suntory. What does Bill say? The city is a device for measuring time.

  “There are kids up there. See them? Around the twentieth floor. Can you believe it?”

  “It’s safer than the streets. Leave them alone,” she said.

  “The streets. I guess I’m ready now.”

  “Then we’ll go.”

  They found the car and Scott drove north along the Hudson and across the bridge at Beacon into dusk and secondary roads, connecting briefly with the thruway and then dropping into networks of two-lane blacktops, hours into night, the landscape reduced to what appears in headlights, to curves and grades and the signs for these, and there were dirt roads and gravel roads and old logging trails, there were steep hills and the sleet-spray of pebbles firing up at the car, there were pine stands lit by the moon. Two near strangers in night confinement inside the laboring drone of the small car, coming out of long silences to speak abruptly, out of long thoughts and memory chains and waking dreams and every kind of mindlife, the narrative that races just behind the eyes, their words sounding clean and shaped in the empty night.

  “I feel as if I’m being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in the mountains.”

  “Tell Bill. He’ll love that,” Scott said.

  2

  The room was dark and the man stood at the window waiting for headlights to appear at the top of the hill and weave across the field, across the tree stumps and bent stalks and rock debris. It was not eager or needful waiting but only a sense that the thing was about to happen and if he stood here a moment longer he would see the car turn into the rutted lane, a wobbly shadow set behind the lights, and come down the hill toward the house, taking on dimension. He resolved to count to ten and if the lights did not appear he would go to the desk and turn on the lamp and do some work, going over what he’d written during the day, the scant drip, the ooze of speckled matter, the blood sneeze, the daily pale secretion, the bits of human tissue sticking to the page. He counted to ten and when no lights showed he began to count to ten once more, slower now, standing in the dark, making an agreement with himself that this time he would really go to the desk and turn on the lamp if the car did not appear at the top of the hill by the time he reached ten, the mud-spattered compact, and settle down to work because it was only children who thought they could make things happen by counting, and he went to ten one more time and then one more time and then just stood watching until the headlights finally showed, splashy white, the car dipping off the rim of the hill and the lights sweeping briefly across the scrub, and strange children at that, the squinters and crappers, the ones who ball up their fists when they cry.

  The car moved into the glow of the porch light. Mud stains on its lower flanks, layers of dust settled at the edges of the windshield outside the overlapping arcs of the wipers. When they got out and walked to the porch steps he went to the door of his workroom and listened to them stamp their feet on the mat and come in downstairs, mingled voices, the ruffle of people entering a house, shaking off coats, making all the incidental noises of transition, the sigh of the full body, homeyness and deep relief, the way it seemed a danger and a lie.

  He closed the door and stood in the dark room, moving his hand across the desktop to find his cigarettes.

  Glad to be indoors after a long journey on a chill night, nowhere. Goulash soup and black bread. Glad to be reminded that kitchens are places for long talks, the late hour, the wood stove and musty wine. Brita had shared a thousand odd dialogues with strangers on planes, intense and shallow, whispery with Existenz. Totally fake really. She could not talk seriously in cars. The car was serial travel, a sprocketed motion that shot her attention span to pieces. Even when the car generated a dull flat landscape she found it hard to unravel herself from the stutter reality of the broken white line and the picture in the window a
nd the Kleenex in the box and break into real talk. She talked in kitchens. She was always following people into kitchens when they cooked meals or got ice for drinks and she talked into their faces or their backs, it didn’t matter, making them forget what they were doing.

  Scott sat across the table, lean and bushy-haired, something of a monochrome, with a beach glow in his pale brows. She thought he was happy to have company, a full-tilt voice from the breathless cities, pieces of experience, and he leaned toward her as if she were whispering, telling him rare and private things. But all she did was push out words, eat and talk, working the human burble. And he gazed, he stared at her, examined with uncalculating interest. If women her age were creatures who went mainly unseen and if she was a slightly weathered Scandian in jeans and sweatshirt who crushes cigarettes in dinner plates, then maybe he wondered what arresting things they might possibly have in common. He was in his absurdly early thirties, faintly unsure.

  “I’ll tell you the truth. I have no idea where we are. Not a bloody clue. And I suppose when I leave we do it by night so I don’t see landmarks.”

  “There are no landmarks,” he said. “But we do it after dark, yes.”

  “Now that I’m here it’s hard to talk for very long about anything but him. I feel there’s something at my shoulder and I can’t help thinking I should refer to it now and then. Many people have tried to find him, I’m sure.”

  “Nobody’s gotten this far. There have been media forays that we’ve heard about, intrepid teams with telephoto lenses. And his publisher forwards mail from people who are setting out to find him, who send word of their progress, who think they know where he is, who’ve heard rumors, who simply want to meet him and tell him what his books have meant to them and ask the usual questions, fairly ordinary people actually who just want to look at his face.”