On the Faculty Club Roof
An inkling of the War to End All Wars
As soon as Arp settles back into Berkshire, he comes to see that he isn’t really there. Either he isn’t, or he wasn’t before. This can’t be the place where he recalls having lived large as a Full Professor at the prestigious mountaintop art institute in which John Spine took his first steps toward producing the film that would cement his position as one of the defining artists of what would likely prove to be his nation’s final century as global hegemon.
Maybe all of that occurred in Zagreb, Arp thinks, as he locks up his house and sets out to wander the campus on which it seems he no longer has any job, and then the War came and I was lucky to escape with my life and now… here I am.
A fresh start. A blank slate.
Everything looks sleepy and gray, the light arcing away from him as he goes past the buildings he used to know, on his way to the Faculty Club where he hosted world luminaries and held forth on the Secret of Art as he’d learned it from Leopold in another world. He tilts toward the revolving door and prepares to shoulder his way in, acknowledging that, if the door doesn’t open, then his presence here is something other than it seems. Either he’s dead or the entire town is, and the question of why he’s returned in no question at all.
***
But the door does open, into a light aura of lunchtime chatter. Everyone recedes, not letting on whether they can tell he’s here, their faces and bodies blurred as if a layer of warm gelatin quivered between his surface and theirs. The gelatin spreads from the kitchen, seeping under the swinging doors, and soon Arp is swimming a few inches off the plush blue carpet, his feet kicking and his arms butterflying out, unsure whether to try to sink or float, or simply to stay where he is as long as he can. He sputters and fights until it grows clear that the force of this material, its indwelling will, is more than he can resist.
He closes his eyes and lets it carry him past the slow, calm chatter of the diners, some of whom look up as if recalling an unsettling moment from early in their careers. He floats through the ceiling and the conference rooms overhead, and up onto the roof, where he lands in a wet pile beside a bedroll that he takes comfort by draping across his shoulders.
He stands inside his bedroll and walks to the edge to gaze across the campus and beyond, into the city streets of what could be either Berkshire or Zagreb or — he considers resisting this thought but sees no reason to try — both. He looks out at the streetcar chugging along the grand boulevard and the students ducking in and out of coffee shops and smoothie stands and he surrenders, more fully even than he’d intended, to the completeness of the phenomenon. To the fact that it’s all laid out for him, right here: what you see is what you get.
Within this surrender, he can see, as he lingers there on the Faculty Club roof and lets the life of the city take its course beneath him, several stops along the road ahead, a road that will culminate, it is now immensely clear, in a final reckoning between himself and Spine:
I will arise from within the film and pull him down with me, he can see, or else Spine will come in here himself and finish me off. Perhaps that’s the goal of the film anyway, the ending that has already been scripted and planned down to the tiniest detail. But that won’t make its actual, eventual occurrence any less significant. The War to End All Wars must still be fought, no matter how long ago its outcome was decided.
***
He descends from the rooftop at dusk and makes his way through the terrain he’d surveyed before, along a series of canals that seem to have appeared just now, eating into the stony mountaintop like rivulets from a flood. He follows their evolving forms until they lead him back to the Decline of Empire, whose airless interior he remembers well from dozens or hundreds of nights on which he sat with Spine in the gloom, parceling out the Secret of Art one tiny clue at a time, while growing aware, likely even before Spine was aware, that one day the application of this Secret would determine the final course of his own life.
Back on his old stool now, he orders a pint of bitter ale and gazes across the muffled heads of the other patrons, through the open front windows of the bar and out at the canal, beyond which the silhouette of a man standing atop the Faculty Club appears to him, as if racking into focus from a distance it could otherwise never cross.