Sketch with two cucumbers and two Adams in it.

1

I prefer addressing you myself. I would try my hand at writing lyrics and poems, numbers perfectly unoriginal with images like glass antlers or mosquitoes in paradise. I would also draw-up vaguely inspired words, or words in combination with others. Embryonate. Syzygy. Poetomachia. I wrote one called "Poem with an Inexplicable Cucumber in It": and short ones, with little meaning for others, just a way to wish my head between covers:

 I have no time to count tree rings,
 No time for a major work in a minor key.
 I have no time for brown rivers--
 No time for mornings
 With Aramangunji in Nepal,
 Afternoons in Hohentalholzheim.

I sought realer inspiration in the stories my patients would relate, even the one with the broken nose from Brazil. He mysteriously thanked me for the missiles America had sent into his country. But then I caught on, he meant grand old-time Hollywood movies with Fred and Ginger, and character actors of the third-tier, real queens like Edward Everett Horton and Sterling Holloway. On the whole, I remained unimpressed with Cinerama, its conglobing of reality, even to this day. I liked things surprisingly lean.

2

I saw anyone who sought my help in group sessions, typically of seven. Not that this number was of a talismanic quality, though its reminder of Jesus casting out the Seven Demons or breathing seven times on Lazarus certainly did not escape me. Like jesting Pilate, I liked to think not much did. I sought that which has sought me.

3

A random thought from the past, I later came to learn, functioned like a trapdoor at a hanging: and I remembered a German proverb that roughly translates a death is the birth of memories. Though I did have the form of an undertaker, I was no extremist. In short, I found the dismal results of my putting pen to foolscap. I'd stick to the science of my psychology books to learn about a phrenologist's dream.

4

(I am sure you realize by now that I am generally not given to volubility or to talking about myself in any way. Self-consciousness, or whatever morbid form of self-absorption, is not my strong suit. Perhaps this is why I study other people. Nothing deepens the soul, I always believed, as much as visionary suffering.)

5

I have been told I sometimes look very old and other times very young. I do know I have something of a protean quality and odd effect on people. I would display my personality in a manner in which all would understand me: great to the great, small to the small, infirm to a healer; to the young, a laughing friend for life. On the whole, however, I am far more at home in the role of the observer. It is perhaps my mercurial personality that makes it easier to identify varied qualities in others. The good and the bad. Their pure madness. I study the geometry of relationships for its own sake. I especially contemplate endings, such things as the death of the old Herald Tribune obituary editor, who was my very first patient here. (In fact, he was something of a hothead.)

6

As part of my declaration of citizenship to this country, I had relinquished my family title. I had been a veritable Nebuchadnezzar of Krug. My girlfriend Celestine Blanche, who opened my eyes with her legs, lithe with sin, and glass face, ravenhair, black-velvet smile, once a ballet dancer until time and its rigors overcame her, would consume much too much Glenlivet with me as well; we would get high as a flute. I think about those days now from time to time, and our many decades together and apart (she all folderol and fog and furs--because of her poor background, she kept items like old business-cards till they were mummified in Scotch Tape); with her French ways and Shalimar, she could bend the straightest arrow; for I know, in short, she was more myself than me. For her sake, I drew away from seeing everyone as but a stain, a stain on the wall, and away from the sham of stage-managing other people's lives: places every one.

7

But Celestine indulged me whenever I painted unusual new or gaudy colors over old paintings, even signing my own name; or redrew, in larger proportion, scuffled Arno cartoons from The New Yorker. She said I looked as triumphal and comfortable as an eggplant. Outside of Salzburg and Bregenzerwald, instead of Mozart she said that these places somehow reminded her of me. Morgen kommt. Nostalgia was a thing of the past.

8

We took many photographs, robed or not, even with an actress-friend who lived nearby, Miss Madeleine (whose eyebrows reminded me of the most human-looking tree), so as not to forget. When Celestine was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, I stopped looking at the photographs. These disheveled geraniums went back into a drawer for someone else to discover. I sold our second home in Geneva and all the furnishings, including the painting of a worldly innocent opening a Pandora's Box that I was especially fond of. I put on my glasses and closed my eyes.

9

I myself lived this close to death among my memories in the converted Addams Hotel so far off Fifth Avenue that it carried contradictory addresses. I was happy, however and above all, to see the eventual decline of decline in New York from my caked windows. When I was younger, my modest apartment was described by an interior-decorator patient as not making a statement: resembling a lending library. I prefer to think of my aesthetic as eclectic, the unconventional synthesis of a nonvirtuoso. I felt I might find more tangible inspiration in the books I had collected. Clemens Brentano. Novalis. Stefan Zweig. Schnitzler. Kraus. Musil. Duerrenmatt. Horvath. Alexander Lernet-Holenia. Leo Perutz. Karl May of the desert. Fabricius ab Aquapendente. Pierre de La Primaudaye. On even the more metaphysical side, elusive Gurdjieff; Swedenborg and Coomaraswamy; Paracelsus. Agrippa. Hildegard von Bingen and the Beguine mystics. Merton and Paul Brunton. A translation of the Zohar.

10

I consulted a clairvoyant in Los Angeles, and I asked this cucumber-shaped vatic if angels really had no lives of their own. He kept a mound in his mind and the idea of a woman singing arias in a vase, so I knew that he was good. The I Ching didn't mean a thing to him. I had searched, from Tibet to the Dead Sea, in my own attempt at mental Kahlschlag, for a prolific guru named Dr. Nutt; only to find my windows facing his. His many books presented a smorgasbord of notions and ideas, seemingly at random and vague, but with a backbone of intent. It was my nature to act on my internal logic, my fascination.

11

To stay eternally connected to the past, I traded my foolscap for the marvels of the Internet. I neither sent nor received E-mails. But after having my rubbers put on and saying farewell to a now-bedridden Celestine in the saintly home very late one night (even though I'm not sure she knew me from Adam or the mournful wallpaper anymore), and with the New York streets transformed into an otherwordly scene in an early snowfall, I would be home and up, like a lonely vampire, all night. The longest. The darkest. The night-watchman of the universe. Winters came so often now. My collection of alabaster eggs sat at my elbow. If I didn't address you myself, who would? It was only my unknown self threatening to escape. I thought of red dust; my little garden of clairvoyants in Budapest, with the tall linden tree in its middle; the mysterious chameleon; what that other real poet, Nutt, from the window opposite mine, might think; out of nowhere, for no reason, I thought of Shakespeare's will, the second-best bed, and the children Celestine and I never had. Life is all melody. I felt an ocean of nostalgia that couldn't be held back, and that I had been the tugboat to the ship of fools. If you read this line, remember not the hand that writ it. I spent hours, deep into the dawn, looking up my past interest. My life as you see it.

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Author:	Lomke, Evander
Publication:	Confrontation
Article Type:	Short story
Date:	Dec 22, 2008
Words:	1379
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