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.
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.
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