The Foreigner’s Deamons

The Foreigner’s Deamons

January 15.  The 6:15 a.m. train into London, leaving Cambridge.

Bookman sits one row forward today.  A man, speaking a language unknown to me, has taken Bookman’s usual corner of the carriage.  It’s the perfect vantage from which to watch the rest of us.  Outside of the First Class compartment, it’s the last seat on the train in which a common person can sit.

The foreigner was anything but common.  As I boarded the train, I encountered him in the aisle.  He was just standing there, arms bracing the seats on each side, as though bridging the Bosporus.  He was observing me.  The convention of allowing others to pass never appeared to enter his mind.  It would have been unnerving was I not paying him the same attention.  I was as contented as he was just to stare.

The foreigner had the stature of a projected man, a screen star, specifically in the character of a 1940’s film vampire.  He was from the golden era of the Silver Screen.  It was ironic that the most colourful man on the train this morning should also be the greyest.  His complexion was ashen.  His hair, uniformly grey.  I had seen whiter men.  The Russian waiter at the Bangkok Restaurant on Green Street, for example.  A life lived in long winters of endless night renders colour without colour.  But, the waiter’s tale is one for another day.

Most men — excluding Bookman, myself and the phys-ed instructor sitting several rows forward — wear suits into London.  Most of these are grey.  The foreigner wasn’t unusual in that.  But, the cut of his grey suit was remarkable.  It was formal evening wear.  Evening wear was seen on the 6:15, but only in June after the May Balls at Cambridge University.  Then, it flowed from the hulks of astonishingly handsome young men rather than frozen to the facing side of an old man.  Crushed velvet collar and cut-glass cuff-links marked an era long gone.  The style of it spoke of old money.  And yet, however unfashionable the foreigner’s attire, he wore it like a dead man, without a wrinkle, as if it was new.

With the seed planted, I allowed myself to think the foreigner, a vampire.  Isn’t Bookman brave, I thought, to sit so close.  His neck, protected by little more than a low-rising seatback.  This train, I reminded myself, leaves Cambridge in darkness and arrives London in darkness, too.  A vampire on a winter’s train could easily disembark to take his leave at one of the tenements in the Red Light district near King’s Cross station, savouring the warmth of Bookman’s blood whilst leaving Bookman’s body to cool on the train’s out-bound journey.

If eternal life comes, I am confident that it comes not as a vampire but as the TV rerun of a sit-com.  Like the afterlife of Friends.  Fittingly, two women, who appeared to have been snapped out of an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, demanded passage.  “Uh-erm-um”, the blonde cleared her throat.  “Let us through”, said the other, “Pull-ease!”  I stepped back into the boarding galley.  The foreigner, into Bookman’s row.  Bookman was buried, nose deep, in a volume entitled, Calculus for the Ambitious.  The two women, then, carried themselves forward; the blonde like a runway model, the other like steerage.  And, I followed suit, down the aisle, and into my normal seat opposite to and a few rows on from Bookman and the foreigner.

I turned back to the sound of clicking heels; the foreigner presenting himself to Bookman.  Still as a praying mantis, head bowed, the foreigner simply smiled.  Bookman smiled back, a toothy boyish grin.  It was an ancient exchange that I recalled from my first foray into seedy downtown bars.  “I could eat you all up.“ I think were the words mouthed as the older man leaned in over me, his breath smelling of spent cigarettes and the sweetness of rum.  I remember myself slipping away.  Bookman sank himself back into his book, turning a leaf as if to wave the foreigner on.  And, I turned back into the current of the now moving train.

The Ab Fab women, seated in a row facing the three of us, observed.  “I never watch tele.” said the blonde, staring off in the direction of the foreigner.  “Absolute drivel.”     — “I must admit,” replied the other, “I do like watching the tele-news for pictures of Nigel Farage.”  Nigel Farage leads the U.K. Independence Party, UKIP, in anti-immigrant, anti-European tribalism.  She spoke the name Farage with a hard /g/, rather than its normal soft French /g/ — Far-raj — as though the man might have been the Raj of a Hindu-nationalist Indian state.  “I think I may have caught him” she breathed heavily, “on an episode of the Simpsons the other night.”  She, too, was focused on the foreigner.  “But, what do I know.  I wasn’t sure that I was awake at the time.”  Good ole Nig does appear to be drawn for the Simpsons.  He’d fit in well at Moe’s, for the beer.

A paper cup cannot be made to sing any more than it can be made to conjure a genie; yet I had been nervously rubbing the rim of my espresso cup.  I’d taken it with abandon, as one would a shot of Maker’s Mark.  Still, the train held its course.  The sun didn’t rise.  And, the two women chatted on, aimlessly, about inane things.  “Ever tried ironing in the buff?” asked the blonde.  “Hopeless!” she answered herself.  How difficult could it be too strip off and iron clothes, I wondered.  Mentally, I’d summoned the image of the woman standing before me naked, tattooed with burns from the hotplate.  “The wrinkle suit?” asked her friend.  The two of them, never looking at one another, instead shifting their attentions between the foreigner, Bookman and myself, as if measuring us up as mates.  It would become clear that this was not a conversation about housework but about aging, and exercise and dieting in particular.  The friend understood how unlikely it would be that the blonde would iron her clothes.  If she needed something pressed, she would buy something new.  It was understood that the blonde wasn’t going about ironing but, rather, was ironing-in, or rather pressing-out wrinkles through exercise.  And, buff was a physical state that, over the years became phat, then fit, then just rolled over and died in the wrinkle suit whilst weight lifting a berliner into one’s mouth. 

In the end, both of the women had become briefly fixed on the youngest of us.  I wasn’t so much jealous of Bookman as I was relieved.  I could lift myself from my seat to dispose of the cup without fear of being objectified as dinner.  Poor Bookman, I thought.  If the foreigner doesn’t have him, the two women will instead.  “Have him” wasn’t quite the phrase that I had had in mind; but, it suffices.

As I passed, I noted that the foreigner busied himself, inscribing a series of paired two-digit numbers in a small spiral notebook.  Each held an apparently random position on the page.  Might they, I thought, have been waltzing to the sound of imagined violins?  Had I pressed any figures into the pages of my journal, they’d have calculated the diametric of the average British man’s thighs.  They, like bumblebees’ wings, are a mystery to me. How could anything so thin both lift the body and propel it forward?  London was full of mystery.  Cambridge, with its greater ratio of foreigners, less so. 

But, what mystery did the foreigner’s numbers convey?  I had little time to ponder their meaning.  The foreigner had noted my passing and hid them from me.  Some say that numbers voice the word of God.  Inherent in everything.     — I remember the voice of my boys’ school eleventh grade music teacher singing as she taught us how to Waltz.  One-Two-Two.  One-Two-Two.  The cadence of her voice, its marble-mouthed Alabama accent thick with Dothan’s honeyed dew, mesmerizing, enchanting those of us whom she called her “proper little gentlemen”.     —But, number theory, M Theory, String Theory, the Theory of Everything would have struck my music teacher as the ciphers of heresy.  Turn a rock.  There am I.  “Why, the Gospel of Thomas was no more than a string of fragments recorded from hearsay”, I would overhear her arguing with the Philosophy teacher in the hall, “from those who, in turn, heard the voice of Christ, from the man himself.”  She would pause to gather her strength, to say a silent prayer.  “Come now.  We all know what happens when a secret is passed around a crowded room.”  The numbers held meaning and yet conveyed none at all.

From the galley, I watched the two women watching me as I spied on the foreigner.  I’d binned my cup and stood listening to his voice, the language I had never before heard.  Incantations, as I imagined them, over the book.  Its metal spiral seemed unworthy to hear them.  One could breathe life into a man made of mud with just a few simple words, the old ways suggested.  When Dina Mhatlowski laid the books of Vilna to rest beneath a barnyard floor as protection from the Nazis, her compatriots first built such a golem; and the rabbi gave it life to safeguard the books at rest.  Words held power as long as their meaning was understood by someone.

The ancient Sumerians counted using the five fingers of exchange and the hand of a trading partner to grasp them.  They sealed the deal with a shake to demonstrate how binding was the agreement.  The foreigner’s system of paired pairs had to have some meaning.  The numbers would dance in my head when I understood.  When the Hindu priests discovered the null number — zero — zed — 0 — they realized that it had been there all along.  Hidden in plain sight, it was like dark-matter is to physicists.  Some part of me, I realized, was not simply watching, but, waiting.

The Funeral (2014 September)

THE FUNERAL

I found myself in a small village last night at dusk.  It was only a few houses and could not have held more souls than populate an English country church.  Around the village, there grew a thin, circular hedge, dense enough but not more than was necessary to establish a boundary.  In spots, I could see through it, out toward the River Ouse. 

By time I'd come upon the village, I had cycled out too far and found myself lost amongst the flat fields of the Fens.  The roads curved and bent to follow rivers and streams, though some measured the length of furrows.  Most of the latter were straight for planting and stretched out from east to west, maximizing exposure to sun at this northern latitude.  By the time I'd entered the village, it didn't matter to me just where I was.  I thought that I should stop, to call for a taxi to return me home.

Despite the sleepy landscape, the village itself was excited.  Not to see me, of course, but with some going-on.  People were running toward the village church.  I was mistaken; at first, believing that I’d landed — that’s often what you do cycling across the wind-blown Fens — landed amidst the village saint’s feast day.  With my luck, I told myself, it would be one of the saints whom had survived bloody bodily harm, one who would have been mangled in some way by the calling to sainthood.  Everyone loves a comeback following adversity.  Look at Lance Armstrong.  Less than a saint; in the end, it was his embodiment of the Livestrong® campaign that got you on your bike.  By hook or by crook, nothing else mattered.  You'd done something for humanity.

The old Norman churches that dot the countryside here in East Anglia were built like German machine-gun bunkers.  During the war, they would have passed as bomb shelters.  This one was like all of the others.  A pillbox whose skin was so thick that its walls stood on a quarter of the building’s footprint.  Its bell tower, in the fading light, appeared to be a finger raised in defiance.  Though I'd heard its bell ring on approach across the Fens, it was silent now.  If not for its clear tenor on the wind, I wouldn't have come to this village.  I’d have continued on toward Ely, which I knew to be in the distance.  There, lured by its lit cathedral, the so-called “ship of the Fens” because it could be seen to sail over a sea of corn crops, I'd have caught the next train back to Cambridge.

Once inside the village, the church lights were lure enough.  Of course, the sight of villagers scurrying into the building at a pace peaked curiosity.  The place was lit inside for the second coming.  The lights were on; and, their burning glory was a metal wheel with bare incandescent bulbs hung over the altar.  Seen through chancel windows, it seemed to sway even in the air’s stillness.  “Come inside”, a man of my age encouraged.  His insistence was more than evangelical.  “You must come inside!” he repeated, tugging at my arm.

I explained that I'd only come to call a cab.  “It was silly of me to have left my mobile at work in London.” I driveled on.  “Come inside”, he said, “you can use mine.”  I suspected that he had no intention of allowing me the use of his phone.  Not until I had been baptized, or, sacrificed on the altar.  But, his grip on my upper arm would soon come untethered and, with it, any hope of making the call.  I allowed him to lead me on.

I noticed, as we crossed the threshold, that parishioners inside were busy with the work of lighting candles.  The candles were everywhere and, particularly, anywhere light would shine come day.  Votive and tea candles warmed to the windowsills.  The wicks of tall, narrow tallows burned bright inside doorways.  Like a devil’s exorcism, the dark for darkness sake was being cast out.  Wax fell from the rafters, from the wings of eavesdroppers, from everywhere that men on stilted ladders could reach. 

The man who led me in turned and again reached out toward me.  “May the Lord protect you this night”, he said as he passed a candle into my hands from a table at the door, “and all of your days.”  I took the language and act as ceremonial.  It was something that he certainly would not have said outside.  "Good to meet you." he might have said shaking my hand.  Behind me, the wooden doors were being pushed closed.  “I hope so too!” I responded, trusting that my American accent world excuse its lack of appropriate formality.  A key turned the lock; and, a medieval plank bolted the door.

Now, I dared not ask to borrow the man’s phone.  Even had I wanted to, for whatever I feared, curiosity trapped me within my skin.  What cult had replaced English Catholicism? I wondered.  What ritual required bolting the door?  Darkness, I could see through the great window behind the altar, had fallen.  I would likely spend the night here.  By time the service ended, no cab would come out this far. 

“Oh.  I’m George.” said the man at my side.  “We won't detain you long.”  He was lying.  His eyelids fell and fluttered as he spoke the words.  We were still standing.  And, now, he was leading me down the small nave toward a baptismal font.  “May I anoint you?” he asked.  His hand cupped water from the font and raised it toward my head.  He intoned a Latin prayer.  The Romans occupied Britain for four hundred years.  The language remained.  Dons at the University of Cambridge still use it to bless their meals, to initiate and close convocation and even, I’m told, in some colleges, to pass the threshold of the cloak room.  “Each of us come to the Lord as we are,” he concluded in English as he wet my forehead, “not as we were born.”  He was staring into my eyes; this time without as much as a blink.

Had this been a pub or even public transport, I would have held his gaze.  Here, it was difficult or, more to the point, uneasy.  It was as though he was digging for something.  Acceptance, if not faith; I don’t know.  My sights drifted toward the sacristy door.  It seemed to quiver in its frame as though a window had been opened in the room beyond.  And, on cue, the door opened.  “Cantemus Domini.  In nomine Patris.” — Let us sing to God.  In the name of the Father.  — one of the female parishioners shuddered as she crossed herself while another uttered the briefest of cries.

The room beyond was dark.  A boy carrying a Paschal candle emerged and, behind him, a priest in robes.  The priest held a Bible as though a shield, which he shifted in order to raise a hand of encouragement to someone, as yet, behind him in the dark.  The scent of cloves was heavy on the air.  Both priest and boy pivoted back toward the door, then knelt, heads bowed.  The congregation followed; and, George pulled me to my knees.

The church already full of light and with the scent of cloves now filled, too, with prayer.  From the sacristy, a bare foot stepped into the light; on its weight, the torso of a naked young man.  I was stunned.  Stepping forward, into a public space, let alone amongst neighbours, must have been an act of contrition.  One that left him at once vulnerable and perfect.  The light stripped him of his blemishes.  Bowed heads, incapable — unworthy perhaps — of noting his beauty, protected his modesty.

The young man made his way slowly toward the altar.  There, he lifted himself and swung his legs up.  He lay silent, eyes fixed on a point above him, perhaps blinding himself in one of the incandescent bulbs.  The young man’s skin grew even more pale in the light.

The congregation rose.  Their eyes followed the priest to the altar.  “This is our son.” He spoke.  Just then, a tapping at the windows began, like the rapping of rain mixed with hail.  It continued; and, the noise of it grew.  "Today, he has been taken from us." the priest continued, shouting over it.  If I had been stunned, I was now puzzled.  The young man was not dead.  Wax continued to rain down. 

George, sensing my bewilderment, explained that the young man had been bitten.  This did nothing to relieve my confusion.  Rabies wasn't known in Britain.  And, if it were, I was sure that Anglo-Catholic ritual had no ceremony that should have required a young man to supine himself on the altar.  “But, he is alive!” I told George, “Look.  You can see him breathing.” 

“That is the young man’s mother.”  George spoke of the woman who had made her way to the altar through the congregation.  She was joined there by two additional women.  Together, they bathed the young man with cloths wetted in the baptismal font.  When they were done, the mother kissed her son’s lips.  “This can go terribly wrong.” George said of the rite.  “Once a young girl returned the kiss; and, a father had to bury both wife and child.”  I began to worry that the young man had been bitten by the Ebola bug, by something deadly to us all.

A full moon shone bright through the great window.  It belied clear skies, betraying the sound of the rain as a lie.  The evening couldn't grow stranger.  It already seemed as improbable as a dream.

The mother stepped slowly back from the son, as if prising herself from the den of a sleeping lion.  The priest now raised his arms and head.  It was a pose that I'd seen earlier in the day — during a visit to the Fitzwilliam museum — on the side of an Assyrian vase.  It was another priest imploring the Divine for salvation.  “Shine your favour on him, oh Lord.”  He pleaded, as he drew a blue ribbon from his vestments.  It had been sewn into the cloth above his heart.  “and, show us your compassion and mercy.” He continued, his breath unbroken as he crossed the young man’s arms over his abdomen and bound them together.

George whispered into my ear the words I half expected to hear.  “Life is a river.” He said.  “Death is an ocean.”  It was as though he was drawing the words from me.  Death is always given the light touch.  You can be a prick in life and sainted in rigor mortis.  “Look, how he holds his breath, they will say of me.” I sighed.  George was smiling.  “The clouds await.”  This was the original blue-sky.  Heaven.  The words were intentionally trite.  The young man’s chest rose and fell gently.

His invocation made, the priest performed last rites.  “Clove oil.” George narrated as the priest silently dipped his thumb into a bowl, and, used it to anoint the young man’s forehead in the sign of the cross.  This was repeated for hands, and, again for feet.  Scented of clove, the priest anointed the young man’s ears, eyes and nose, pausing before making the sign of the cross over his lips.  These were the parts of the young man that had interacted with the world.  Touching it.  Taking it in.  Speaking to it.  One last time, the priest placed his thumb in the oil.  “Poor little fella”, George distracted.  “I understand he never got to use that properly!”  I turned back just in time to see the priest lift his fingers from the young man’s penis.  “Anointing of the groins;” explained George, “most English churches have abandoned the practice.”

With this, the three women folded the altar cloth over the young man's body.  It would serve as a shroud.  The tapping at the windows began to die back.  “This passion play will soon be over”, I thought.  “How good it was”, I looked forward to telling George, “to have come in unknowing.”  I would have to admit that I was a little creeped-out.  In response, he would say something plain but cryptic.  The young man would slough himself off of the altar, and, put on his clothes.

This was not to be.      — You don't want to see the end coming.  Perhaps what I was seeing was in part the product of fatigue.  I’d come a long way without enough water.  I was lost.  Disoriented.  For all I knew, the young man breathing on the altar was actually eighty-two; dead, of cancer; lying in an open casket.  But, I couldn't convince myself of it.

In the end, it happened swiftly.  The priest took a wooden cross from the altar boy — raised it toward the rafters — and, quickly drove it down into the young man’s chest.  In the moment, I don't recall a sound.  There was nothing, not even silence.  I recall George wrapping one arm around me, while using the other to grasp mine before I fainted.

I was found on a roadside south of Ely and woke in a Cambridge hospital.  It appeared, the police said, that I had been taken out in a hit-and-run.  My bike was mangled.  I was fortunate, they told me, that I'd been thrown into the wheat beyond the verge.  When asked if I knew who'd done this, if I'd seen a registration plate, I told them this story.  I have told everyone who would listen.  Now, I've even written it down.  The nurse told me that it was a dream.  But, I can see the imprint of George’s fingers around my upper arm.