Seafloor Strewn with Clues
& ash from the War overhead
As Arp moves from one hotel to the next, freezing solid in the same armchair in every lobby in order to relieve his frozen-solid counterpart, he realizes that he has no idea what ought to be under the sea.
He isn’t even sure that’s where he is.
He roams from one marshy, cool expanse of seagrass and slick rock to another, always gauging distance in terms of how far behind him the last hotel has receded, and how close the next one appears to be. He looks overhead at watery cloud cover and cannot say if he’s looking up at the sky over Nova Scotia or the surface of the water beneath it, nor even why Nova Scotia is the term he’s chosen to describe his location to himself (and to whomever may be listening).
***
Memories of his youth and young adulthood in Zagreb commingle with intimations of the coming years in Berkshire, teaching at the college and mentoring Spine and then, having taught Spine the Secret of Art, letting Spine kill him and take his place through the film he would go on to make, imprisoning him — me, Arp reminds himself — inside that colossal edifice of pen and ink and gears and wire and tufts of glued-on hair, that colossal animated machine which — the thought drifts down in front of him like ash from a fire overhead — I may still be stuck within now.
Perhaps the whole film is on fire. Spine’s young career going up in smoke!
He looks left and right and up and down, at the entirety of what he considers either Nova Scotia or the Atlantic seafloor, and takes some comfort in considering that perhaps all of this is no more than a sequence in his star student’s breakout film.
The film that made his name. That made him far more famous than I ever was.
This thought likewise drifts down in front of Arp and lands, shivering and crumbling like a piece of scorched newspaper, atop his Crockett & Jones walking boots, which he bought for himself at a boutique in London upon his promotion to Full Professor at Berk in... the near future?
He bats the contradiction away and continues through the ash and smoking fragments, thickening the air until he’s forced to sit on a bench that someone shoves beneath him just before he falls on the ground. Looking up at the War, he can only see its underside, panzers flattening Zagreb and snipers trading fire from the windows of the building he grew up in and the one where he went to school, and, behind it all, Leopold in his crisp blue suit behind his polished mahogany desk, blotting espresso from his whiskers and primping his mane with hands that, as Arp pictures it, oscillate calmly between those of a man and those of a lion.
Though there’s no discernible danger all the way down here, Arp picks up the pace nonetheless. The air grows warm and the smoke makes him dizzy as he hurries toward what he imagines must be Berkshire, or at least the coast of New England, somewhere in Maine perhaps, and as he runs he recalls the Great War that uprooted him from Zagreb and that then — though maybe he’s only conceiving of this now, letting himself get carried away — splintered Berkshire as well, simultaneously melting the city walls and opening its streets to reveal the trench filled with everyone he’d ever known and would ever know, making of Berkshire a world, a capsule from which there could be no escape nor, soon, even any such desire.
***
Very soon, the notion of the desire for escape, and even the possibility of regret for its absence, becomes a thing of the past. He arrives in a Berkshire at once destroyed and consecrated by the War, having gathered all the clues he could from the undersea journey that brought him here. He walks into town dripping water, as if he’s just materialized from a shoreline that vanished as soon as it disgorged him. He crosses campus, past the library with its all-night cafe glowing in the back of the otherwise darkened lobby, and continues over a brook and along a footpath past the Beekman Philosophy Center to his house at the edge of campus, reserved, when he first arrived, for each year’s Artist-in-Residence but then, for reasons he can no longer recall, deeded over to him in perpetuity…
Until he died and deeded it to Spine, who now…?
“It’s all coming back to me!” he declares with a laugh, as he pulls the keys from his pocket, where he’s nearly certain they’ve only now appeared, and lets himself in, indifferent to the pile of mail on the doorstep and the rotten-garbage-and-dead-houseplant stench in the still air of the living room.
***
The next morning, while the coffee pot groans, he sees himself dripping down the back side of the story, reentering the house through a lonely, misshapen, rarely utilized door, one that his primary self — who he now views as a kind of son, Spine or a Spine-stand-in — ought to have been guarding all along.
You never should have let me in, he thinks, filling his mug when the pot beeps and shuffling to his armchair in the living room, where he claps to turn on the light and then, rifling through a pile of blackened newspaper fragments in Croatian and Habsburg Viennese, reads the following:
“By the end of this episode, he understands that he’s not going to reach his destination, nor is he going to learn to love the journey. Rather, some third thing will occur, or is occurring, or has occurred: his destination is going to take shape and density all around him, slowing him down and hemming him in until he can journey no further and then it will turn out that here he is, back in Berkshire, or here for the first time, sick with premonition — inside or outside of Spine’s film, a distinction that now strikes him, though perhaps only out of necessity, as embarrassingly juvenile.”
He puts the newspaper down, coughs on the smoke it releases, claps to turn out the light, and sips his coffee lovingly and without haste in the dark.