Chapter 10: A Penance Play

I fall down and down and down, into a yet-deeper version of the story, which is also a version of the show I remember so well from my college days.

(Art by Bruce Bickford)

Back in my asylum bed, I chew cotton and taste ether, casting them as the feel and flavor of my own tongue, while I wait for both to abandon me. In time they do, leaving nothing but a numb flavorless hock in their place—I’ve bitten off more than I can chew! I hear myself think, as I drift downward, a familiar gravity pulling me deeper into the sheets that the Pale Oaks nurses have wrapped me in.

Though I know I must look more like a mummy, I picture myself tunneling straight down like a pneumatic drill, a sharp, drill-nosed nerve housed within the central column of the Spine, past one Pale Oaks after another, each built on the ruins of its predecessor, a whole history of Pale Oaks’s, their only remaining connection the dusty heat of my accelerating descent.

In the far distance, I can hear other drills drilling, other versions of me perhaps, descending in tandem just out of sight to my right and left. I fixate on whether to pity or envy them, stuck in their own timelines orthogonal to mine, and then I fixate on whether there’s any sense to this question, or if it’s a given that their fate and mine must be identical, the only difference being that mine will occur here—to me—while theirs will occur there, to them.

As I sink deeper, I feel the past and the present mapping themselves onto my descent, and I wonder which I’m approaching and which I’m leaving behind. The past, of course, is both more seductive and more discomfiting, a sticky length of flypaper or bath of honey in which I yearn to get stuck but know I ought not to, and yet if, instead, the present is down below, and the past above, does that mean I am at last moving forward, perhaps out of this chapter for good, as I’ve been told I will one day have to, leaving the Pale Oaks behind so the next version of me can take my place in bed?

Something spits me out and I tumble, flailing through cold, featureless space in which my mummy-shroud is unwrapped—I picture myself spinning around and around and around—and then I land on wooden feet on a stage and hear myself say, “Leaving the Pale Oaks behind so the next version of me can take my place in bed?”

I hear my lips clack open and closed, and I look out through a prism of spotlight onto a packed auditorium as desperation crosses my face. I can’t feel this desperation anywhere except on my face—nowhere in my gut or core does it seem to originate—but picturing how I must look is enough to tell how I must feel.

“Please,” my lips clack, as another puppet strides onstage and hands me a letter. “Please, let me return. Don’t leave me out here alone”—paper snow begins to fall from the rafters, as a backstage sound machine lets out a windy Arctic whir—“just tell me how to find my way back and I’ll go there and stay put this time. Tucked snugly in my bed, warm and cozy as a mummy, nightmares circling above and beneath me without ever again gaining access to my Spine. Please accept my sincerest apologies for having dreamed of escape, for having yearned to regress, and tell me now what I must do to prove that I will never dream of it again.”

The puppet bows like a royal Victorian courier as I accept the letter, and remains in that position while I watch my multi-jointed wooden fingers peel off the red wax seal and unroll the parchment inside. Though my head continues to feel solid, with no sense of inner activity, I hear my mouth open and words begin to emerge.

“Dearest Arp,” I hear myself read, as I look out again at the audience, seeking the Emperor’s approval wherever he’s seated. “You have been offered one final chance to return. A last lifeline, well beyond what you deserve. Greater forces have taken pity on you, enmeshed, as you are, in a drama whose design exceeds the grasp of your limited faculties.”

I raise a hand to my face here and swoon in mock humility, earning a small but gratifying chuckle from the front row.

“And so,” I continue, my voice rising toward what must already be the climax of the scene, “a train—the final train—is approaching. Board it and return to Berkshire. Leave the rubble of Vienna behind. A storm is coming, a vicious, smoldering cataclysm. The end of the End of Empire. Escape before it’s too late, before this great city is reduced to cinder and ash, its population liquidated and boiled away, good only for soap that no one will use. The train is here, Arp. You are getting on it now.”

I drop the scroll as the noise machine breaks into a garish wheezing and chugging and a child-sized choo-choo train clatters across the stage, pulled by two dwarves in matching polka-dot beanies. They drag it up to where I’m standing and bow exactly as the courier did, watching me maneuver first my right leg and then my left into the seat, and settle my heft as best I can, despite its being about twice as large as the entire train, an effect that elicits another round of laughter from the front row.

This laughter rises in volume and intensity until it melts the scene into an impressionistic montage where I’m simultaneously in the train and watching myself in the train from behind a wavering scrim that, in time, coalesces into a dorm-room TV screen. As I feel myself stretch between these two locations, nothing but the Spine connecting us, I hear the voice that I until now considered my own say, “And so, esteemed viewer, this is the story of how Arp escaped the End of Empire just in the nick of time, and returned to Berkshire, where, as we will see, his journey took a yet-stranger turn.”

The familiarity of this voice, combined with the light harp music and the cellophane water, cardboard factories, and giant plastic warheads arrayed just outside of town soothe me as nothing in the penance play so far has. The version of me that’s watching this on TV reclines yet deeper into the familiarity, gladly letting go of the sense of alarm—the sense that something has gone badly wrong—that I’d felt just a moment ago.

I lie back on the couch and let the Spine & Arp title sequence lull me into total relaxation, just as it always does, opening a portal to the warm purgatory between waking and sleep in which I’ve watched every single episode so far, many of them more than once. I feel the weight of the many levels I’ve descended, all the ground overhead, the entire Pale Oaks sequence, raise the pressure around me until it grows high enough to force the story back into coherence, crushing the loose ends and boiling my confusion down to something dense and solid and simple.

It flattens the streets of Vienna as I chug through them on what now feels like a real train, the memory of its having been a miniature choo-choo train now relegated to the part of my mind that files away ideas for future films. I remember the penance play, the puppet onstage begging the Emperor Franz Joseph, himself a puppet, for forgiveness, the mummy drilling down through the levels, myself and Dubravka strolling arm-in-arm through the campus of the Academy of Fine Arts, but all of this seems notional now, a scene from a film I haven’t made yet but might make one day, if all goes well in Berkshire.

Now that the scene is real again, I lie back against the headrest in my compartment and listen to the narrator—easily explicable as the voice of my own thoughts, comfortably returned to the privacy of my own living head, where it belongs—explain the scenario, as he does at the start of every episode:

“So, Arp accepted the Emperor’s invitation to teach at Berkshire and, as he rolled in past the outskirts, his heart was warmed to see that not all of Vienna, to say nothing of the Zagreb of his boyhood, had been lost. Indeed, here, like a spare city rushed into storage just as the first waves of apocalypse rose into view, was every storefront, courtyard, boulevard, pastry shop, and side alley he held most dear, arrayed into a playground for the sole benefit of his soul.”

A laugh-track overwhelms the narration at this point, and I find myself laughing along with it—perhaps laughing as part of it, if the Arp in the show can hear the Spine watching, as I’m growing ever more certain he can… as indeed he must if it’s true that both are me.

This Arp—here I warn myself to never again speak of him as someone else—departs the train when it stops at Berkshire Station and begins his iconic walk across the platform, up the wide main boulevard that separates the station from the city, patterned on Tkalčićeva Ulica in Zagreb, leading toward the main square, where, in my youth, I would sit with folios of Dürer and Hogarth etchings and recreate the lines, as precisely as I could, on the smoothest, most luxurious paper I could afford, dragging my charcoal across the white surface in a state of absorption whose addictive intensity would dictate the rest of my life, my ongoing search for a studio in which I could be at last truly free of the world and, by that same token, more immersed in it than I ever had been before.

These are the thoughts peopling my head as I pass out of Berkshire’s Viennese Zagreb, carrying a leather briefcase that seems to contain all my memories of the Pale Oaks, and begin to cross the BerkshireArts campus, where the next phase of my life will play out. The last refuge, I think, the one safe haven in the collapsing world. The location of the sacred studio in which I will transcend the immanent plane and, at the last possible moment, make a permanent home for myself, on my own terms, as a Great Artist in the very bosom of the really-real.

I look up at the sky and remember the many levels I drilled through to end up here, the Pale Oaks above me and the Pale Oaks above that, but then I duck back into the show, as if it were a tank I could immerse myself in at will, and in this tank the memories fade and the story I’m enacting now, the one in which I’m about to let myself into a small but elegant house on the edge of campus and begin the long but rewarding work of becoming a local legend, developing a kind of following here in Berkshire that I never quite attained in Zagreb or Vienna, takes over the rest of my attention and I resolve to act fully within it, letting the suspicion that it represents only a fraction of what’s actually afoot here fade, just as I always do at this point in every episode’s arc.