Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit Read online

  On cold nights, when she was young, he would hold her little feet in his hands to warm them as he sang:

  You are my sweet sweet girl

  And I love you so.

  This song will last forever

  Long long after I go.

  The PATIENT chokes up, memories triggered of her own dad, now deceased, singing tenderly to her when she was little.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Are you OK? Do you need a minute?

  PATIENT

  (takes a deep breath, exhales)

  I’m good.

  (she resumes, this time giving the words a melody)

  You are my sweet sweet girl

  And I love you so.

  This song will last forever

  Long long after I go.

  The old watchmaker and his daughter clinked their shot glasses of gravy, toasting their everlasting devotion to each other. They reminisced and gossiped and laughed, the father buying time before he was forced to deliver the terrible news to his sweet girl, who tilted her head and gazed at him, her eyes and smile shining bright and wide with loving admiration and solicitude.

  “So, what did the physician—that ancient mountebank—say?” the daughter asked, fidgeting with some soggy cardboard coaster on the table and pursing her lips nervously.

  Now the watchmaker took a deep breath…

  “Everything’s perfectly fine,” he lied. “I’m in robust health.”

  The prospect of inflicting upon her the grim news of his dire condition overwhelmed him with dread. He was incapable of saying or doing anything that might hurt her or make her sad. He simply couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  She shut her eyes and exhaled, her face slackening with relief.

  “Oh Father, I was so worried,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “That’s the most wonderful news to hear!”

  She reached across the table and held his cold hands in hers to warm them.

  Looking at her keen, happy face, the old watchmaker felt terribly guilty. Withholding the truth from her was so antithetical to the openheartedness and candor of their relationship. She would feel such a profound sense of betrayal knowing that he hadn’t confided in her, that he’d allowed her to be so blindsided, left her so vulnerable, so cruelly unprepared for the shock of his impending death. Each time, though, that he thought he’d sufficiently girded himself to reveal what the physician had actually said, his resolve would disintegrate, that lump in his throat would rise, blocking the words from coming out. But just as he’d given up, hanging his head with the shame of his own abject cowardice, everything suddenly fell into place as if the inner workings of one of his watches, scattered in disarray upon his work table—all the tiny gears and springs—had spontaneously arranged themselves into the intricate movement of a timepiece. There was a way of sparing her, of telling the truth that wouldn’t be so excruciatingly painful. Resorting to a sort of sleight of hand, he would convey this dreadful news obliquely, by way of an allegory.

  “I chanced upon the most marvelous marionette show on the way to the inn,” said the old watchmaker.

  “Oh, how charming, Father!” said his daughter. “Tell me, what was the show about?”

  Now he could unreservedly express how deeply, how completely, how exquisitely he loved her… and say goodbye.

  And thus began the watchmaker’s vivid, extended, and increasingly intoxicated re-creation of the tale enacted by the marionettes, a tale from an even more remote, primeval time, a tale which was called La Muñeca de la Mafia Chalazian (“Baby Doll of the Chalazian Mafia”):

  There was once a great and fearsome warlord known all over Chalazia for his ruthless ferocity, cunning, noble magnanimity, and the breadth of his esoteric wisdom. He had a daughter, his only heir, whom he adored and cherished beyond anyone and anything. She was a brilliant young woman, and beautiful besides. So she had hundreds of suitors. But she devoted herself most conscientiously to counseling her father about the internecine complexities of his vocation, which was, of course, both felonious and philanthropic. Knowing that her father would never allow her to participate in his “business,” she disguised herself as a typical henchman, becoming her father’s most trusted advisor (his consigliere, in other words).

  The day came when the father, suffering from hereditary Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a degenerative and fatal neurological prion disease, akin to bovine spongiform encephalopathy and afflicting most Chalazian men late in life), knew he was dying and called his daughter to his bedside. Blind, racked by myoclonic jerks and twitches, and able only to gasp and whisper, he drew her close and said, “I’ve known all along that it was you giving me such shrewd advice. Who else but my own beloved daughter could have been so wise, so selfless and loyal?” He bestowed upon her the title La Muñeca de la Mafia Chalazian and bequeathed to her his legacy of exotic riches, material and mystical. “Be careful, my dearest one, that the man you marry loves you and does not simply covet all that I’ve worked so tirelessly to amass.” And with that he took his final breath and perished.

  The daughter went on to become the most powerful woman ever to reign over a criminal enterprise, the organization under her command soon orders of magnitude vaster than her father’s had ever been.

  And who do you think she married from among the hundreds of handsome but conniving young suitors who’d sought her hand? None of them!

  She married the effete little gnome who lived under the ground in a deep well who had frequently disguised himself as the warlord’s daughter to facilitate the real daughter’s dissimulation.

  In fact, at their wedding, they dressed as each other. A custom that still prevails in Chalazia to this day!

  “And just as the curtain fell, the storm began,” said the old watchmaker upon finally concluding this drama of a dying warlord and his daughter’s patrimony, his rendition taking well over two hours and considerably more embellished, convoluted, and drunkenly digressive, and including, as it did, his uncanny mimicry of the speech patterns and gesticulations of each and every character, major and minor.

  “And you should have seen how comical it was,” he continued, “when all these marvelous marionettes tried to scurry off under their own power, without the help of the puppeteers, who’d abandoned them onstage to seek shelter from the deluge!”

  And then, upon further consideration of the plight of these frantic, crippled puppets, he added, “I suppose it was a bit sad too.”

  Perhaps his daughter wasn’t consciously aware of what he was conveying to her at that very moment, through this tale of the fervently devoted relationship between a powerful, ailing father and his only heir, his cherished, indomitable girl (his muñeca, his “little doll”), to whom, on his deathbed, in the play’s anguished tearjerker of a finale, he bequeaths his vast criminal empire. But the old watchmaker was confident that someday after his death, his daughter would think back and say to herself, “He told me. In his gentle, caring, oblique, and allegorical way, he told me everything that last night.”

  The marionette play, as recounted by the old watchmaker, features two stock characters of late-medieval folklore: the Chalazian Mafia Godfather, a combination of shtarker and tzaddik, of thug and holy man, fusing within himself the ruthlessness of the transnational gangster warlord and the atemporality of the eremitic mystic in the forest, who is traditionally represented as sleeping beneath portraits of Meyer Lansky and the Baal Shem Tov. He, in turn, dotes indefatigably on his daughter—the gorgeous young woman in her mid-twenties, her lustrous black hair in a plaited chignon, who is chaste, introspective, aloof, fearless, blessed with extraordinary mixed martial arts skills, a devotee of Dadaist poetry and the Japanese koto, and fanatically loyal to her father.

  Such was the strange evolution of gently smiling holy men and the cunning, vindictive hoodlums who protected them and did their bidding into hybrids of both, and such is the strange milieu that is Chalazia today.

  As he recounted the marionette play, the old watchmaker was drinking relentlessly, furiously, opening his throat like a marathon runner at a hydration station, gulping double gravy after double gravy and then hurling himself back into the narrative. And whereas one might think that the mind-boggling amount of alcohol he was consuming would, if not completely disable his capacity to continue, at the very least result in the sort of monotonous, repetitive, sophomoric, ultimately incoherent drivel you’d expect, it did not. To the contrary. Acting almost like a magical potion, the gravy had somehow rejuvenated him for the rigors of this fabulation (we can’t help but wonder if there was even an actual marionette play in the first place), and steeled his determination to bestow this allegory upon his daughter, in all its loving plenitude and with its scrupulously encoded message. Yes, the histrionics became somewhat amped up, the syntax a bit sloppier, the perspective more kaleidoscopic, the embellishments ever more baroque—but somehow the alcohol acted like a drawing salve that extracted and put at his disposal all the disparate emotional and psychological motifs necessary for him to synthesize this anguished aria, to speak the unspeakable to her.

  Meanwhile, the inn had filled with its typical habitués: the hermits and woodsmen and sailors, the peasants and pipers, the shopkeepers, dockworkers, peddlers and cobblers, the merchants and horsemen and foot soldiers, and the fat little babies battened on smoked whitefish salad and tapioca and marzipan.

  At first, outbursts of raucous laughter and profane slurs and ribald exhortations clashed with and undermined poignant moments in the watchmaker’s telling. (At one point, apropos of nothing, some drunk yelled out, “Everything is spurious!”) The men in the inn appeared completely indifferent, oblivious. You could never catch any of them actually listening. But then, it really did come to seem (at least, to seem) that these men began to constitute an audience in the sense that their collective affect (laughter, groans, sighs, etc.) appeared (or was it just coincidence?) to be in sync with tonal shifts in the watchmaker’s story. Under scrutiny, this phenomenon would immediately vanish. That apparent interest, that attention seemingly directed the watchmaker’s way, would, on closer inspection, reveal itself to be nothing more than the glassy gaze, the stupefied gape of another lush. Nevertheless, the fluctuating dynamics within the story did actually seem, at various junctures, to orchestrate the ambience of the room.

  And so the watchmaker finally (again, this had, by now, taken up several hours!) reached the heart-wrenching conclusion in which the dying Chalazian godfather, succumbing after a grim, protracted battle with Familial CJD, bestows the entirety of his criminal kingdom upon his beloved, grief-stricken girl (his muñeca), and, with his dying breath, bids her farewell.

  The bar was silent. The daughter was deeply moved, shaking her head incredulously, tears in her eyes, speechless… but the spell was soon broken when, moments later, she looked up at the large clock on the wall and realized how late it had become. She rose from the table, put on her hooded cloak, and gave her father a big long hug, a culminating reprise of her earlier relief, pausing to hold him at arm’s length, and tilting her head so she could affectionately appraise him, and then hugging him once more, this time with a spontaneous jolt of ardor, triggered in ways she’d only be conscious of much later by all the potent emotional symbolism with which her father had seeded his long, assiduous reconstruction of the marionette play. And she kissed him goodbye one last time, and she departed to meet her fiancé, a handsome cavalryman with a long, keloidal dueling scar across one side of his face.

  The old watchmaker knew he’d never see her again. (Can a liver “break” like a heart?)

  And the tears, which fell from his jaundiced eyes and spread across the rough-hewn table, crystallized, metamorphosing into a reflective surface—a mirror which, in the middle of the night, while all the drunks “slept” in a state of suspended animation, the little elves mounted above the sink in the men’s room—

  The PATIENT stops, eyes occluded, arms akimbo.

  PATIENT

  There were men’s rooms back then?

  The OPTOMETRIST shrugs.

  PATIENT

  (again reading through the phoropter)

  —and when the watchmaker entered and looked at himself, an infinite mise en abyme was generated by the reflections of the mirror in the pupils of his eyes, the specular images ricocheting back and forth at the speed of light.

  And within this shaft of incandescent effervescence resides the sublime truth that we inhabit an imaginary world without meaning.

  And this dazzling lucidity prompts us to either dance or die, or both dance and die.

  And this, comrades, is “the orgy.”

  OPTOMETRIST

  (with an upraised fist)

  Yes!

  PATIENT

  When the old watchmaker emerged a while later, he gazed disconcertedly across the inn toward the table where they’d been sitting. He’d forgotten that his daughter had left.

  He’d managed by necessity—through the extremity of his sorrow and the desperation of his love, really—to temporarily transmute the alcohol into a kind of fortifying elixir. But now that this was no longer necessary, without the imperative of that mission (the allegorizing of the marionette play) which propelled him forward by the sheer force of its exigency and which constituted a kind of stabilizing torque, he collapsed.

  The alcohol seemed to hit him with a delayed, cumulative, pent-up force, a wave of gravy, a lifetime of gravy hit him, and literally knocked him off his feet. Or was it his own incipient Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the symptoms of which he’d never acknowledged out of fear of alarming his daughter) or the magnifying effect of both his intoxication and the CJD that caused the old watchmaker to spin and fall as he did?

  He struggled to stand, to walk. But his direct line from point A to point B—from men’s room to table—shattered into a delirium of vectors. He staggered, caroming into every surface he encountered, now a human Pong ball, erratically traversing the bar back and forth in a welter of veering zigzags, crosshatching the bar’s space, repeatedly collapsing in vertiginous pirouettes, groveling along the floor on all fours, somehow clambering again to his feet, lurching along another haphazard, oblique trajectory, gesticulating like an airline attendant in an effort to navigate himself, teetering in circles, grasping for imaginary overhead handrails like a brachiating chimp, until he impacted another table or another wall, and whirled uncontrollably to the ground in a heap, like those forsaken, hobbling marionettes trying to escape the storm.

  He cycled through a series of ritualistic masks—a truculent scowl became a look of contemptuous hauteur and then a coy pout and then a look of cringing chagrin, the imperturbable serenity of a beatified saint suddenly giving way to PTSD shell shock and then the panic of someone about to be immolated by a mob. He looked up from the floor, like a hard-shelled insect on its back, helpless, simpering with mortification.

  It was a long, pitiable, shambolic Dance of Death… a Danse Macabre… some improbable version of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh, his “dance of total darkness.”

  Of course, this looked like, from one perspective, nothing more than a drunk stumbling out of a men’s room and trying desperately, and without success, to maintain his balance, to stay on his feet long enough to return to his seat. But from another perspective there seemed to be a very deliberate choreography, where every action and every tilt of the head and positioning of a limb became meaningful. This was the phantasm of a body, the staging of a transubstantiation, a struggle with and rapturous capitulation to one’s fate, the physical articulation of yet another allegory.

  His body, to borrow the words of the dance critic Jennifer Homans, “was pitched at swerving angles; arms, legs, hips, head oriented through multiple spatial planes, his eyes sent in one direction, jaw in the other, rib cage in one direction, hips in the other. Soon the feet turned out, the line took shape, the familiar positions emerged. His movements were wide, open through the chest, with deep épaulement, but they were also torqued and knotted, the limbs working in rhythmic counterpoint.”