Houdini Heart

  Has an artist ever jumped off a roof?

  ~

  He was told by a reliable source (an actual cop in the actual New York City police force) that the most efficient way to commit suicide was to use a .38 caliber revolver. But because folks in extremis so often missed when using a handgun, or turned themselves into instant root vegetables, the revolver had to be loaded with hollow point bullets. The cop explained that hollow points disintegrate on impact—no chance of surviving when that happened. (Although Don Carpenter managed his small handgun well enough for the job. A good friend of fellow suicide Richard Brautigan, Carpenter was a writer who wrote about Hollywood like it was really Hollywood: hard and cruel and painful and almost always a dead-end.)

  We both found the inside tip quite interesting, but, said he, if he ever decided to kill himself, he wouldn’t use a gun, no matter how efficient. He said he’d drink himself to death. I said that, like Dylan Thomas and Nick Nolte, he was already doing that. He said fuck you. So I said if I were to kill myself, being a woman, I couldn’t possibly use a gun—I mean, as Brautigan’s last written words had pointed out, guns were pretty messy. I thought drowning sounded about right. No pain. No blood. No mutilation. No getting found with your neck stretched to some disgusting length and your face a tornado blue. No getting your head pulled out of a toilet. But drowning in deep water, well…your hair does such lovely things down there, that is, for the first few days or so. Think of Shelley Winters drifting about with pond weed in A Place in the Sun. He laughed. I laughed. It was a golden afternoon by the green and golden sea and neither one of us believed we’d ever kill ourselves. After all, he was a successful movie star, I was a successful writer, and Kate was a successful toddler. All three of us lived in Malibu. Who kills themselves in Malibu?

  ~

  I’m sitting on the cold roof, my back against the tower, drinking straight from the bottle. Window’s open. I pried it open with my old hammer and my new chisel. I’m pretty sure I’ve made another of my messes and this time there’s no ceiling tiles to cover it up. It doesn’t matter. By the time someone notices, and that someone is bound to be the maintenance man who shops where I shop, a few years could have come and gone. By then, I won’t give a shit. Me, I’m working up the nerve to climb through the window. The light inside the tallest tower has grown brighter and there’s music just as there was music before, only this music isn’t Cole Porter. It’s nothing like Cole Porter. This is more like a turn-of-the-century hurdy-gurdy: organ and trumpet. It’s strangely familiar but not familiar enough for me to name it. No one’s singing; there are no lyrics. Shivering, I lean back listening, and slugging down the red wine. Still no sound from the streets below. I haven’t heard a single car, a single voice, a single dog or cat or cow (this is, after all, Vermont), a single noise aside from my own noise, and now this music, since I locked my apartment down on the third floor ages and ages ago. Days ago, months ago, a minute ago. Who knows anymore? I think time has stopped being a dimension, at least for me. I think it’s standing still. I think it’s a permanent three in the morning. Something else I think is that I no longer exist in the same place everyone else exists in…not since I invited the young man into my room. Or maybe not since I made that other mess in the faraway kitchen. (Closet, wall in my room, bathtub, door to the ballroom, curtain wall in the ballroom, window in the corner tower: if I owned this building, I’d evict me on the spot.) I think something happened somewhere along the way that changed everything. That’s what I think. But who cares what I think? It’s how I’m feeling that’s beginning to worry me. Am I frightened? Oh yes, oh my god, I am frightened. Scared enough to swallow my tongue.

  What’s this? There’s no more wine in my bottle. I drank the whole thing? In what, two minutes? Holy shit. Now what? Leave it on the roof? Or throw it as far as I can, listening for the sound of its sudden smash on the street below? I’d never do that. What if I hit someone? Even if I missed, still, what about the glass all over the street, glass shards scattered all over the sidewalk? Tomorrow, when I am no longer here, a little kid could cut her little feet. Or a dog, his innocent doggy pads. Or a heifer, her new-born hooves. In Little Sokoki, heifers often wander the streets. It’s that kind of town.

  I stand up and throw the bottle as far as I can, practically dislocate my shoulder doing it, and yes, there is a distant smash of glass on the ground far below.

  Last chance. Will someone now open their window in outrage? Will they see me, yell at me, call the cops on me? Will they save my strange and useless life? I must want them to. I threw the bottle, didn’t I?

  Nothing. Nothing happens. No lights go on. No windows open. No furious curious head sticks out. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I am alone in this illusion. It’s all mine.

  There’s nothing left to do but climb in the window.

  I climb in the window, which isn’t easy with a tool-belt full of tools to drag through with me.

  ~

  I knew she’d be there. I knew she’d be Kate’s age by the time I got into the tower. If it was ever psoriasis on her face and her neck, it isn’t psoriasis now. It’s pond weed, bright green duck weed, the kind that floats on the top of the water. I didn’t know she’d have the dog. But he’s there too, smiling at me. She isn’t, but he is…a big sloppy bloody doggy smile. She’s staring at me. Nothing more. Nothing less. Staring at me. Like bad snapshots, the center of her eyes are red. I’ve been humiliated since I came here by the visions of other artists, better artists—is this my final, my worst, punishment? To have the ugly woman turn into a sly girl turn into a threatening child turn into a terrifying toddler turn into my Kate? And the dog? He’s a small dog now, small and black with dots of tan over his eyes, on the tip of his tail. Am I supposed to believe it’s my dog, my Prince, the one I caused to be run over by a car because I was a child and he was a puppy and we neither of us knew that life could kill?

  They’re both standing as far from the entrance window as they can get. There really isn’t much room anywhere else since the whole of the tower is taken up by something enormous hanging from the high central ceiling boss.

  This isn’t what Faye found waiting for her at the top of the stairs in The Windigo’s Daughter. Somehow it’s worse. Faye found her true shape, her true self. What have I found?

  Faye means to run in her house and to shut her door and never come out again. But in her fear—and because of the skirt over her head—she runs ever and ever closer to the sugar saplings at the edge of her lawn, saplings like doorjambs. Wherever she goes, she is followed by the swarm of buzzing bees. More and more of them clinging to her arms, to her legs, to the red dress. Faye, once red, is now black and yellow with bees.

  The bees drive Faye to the very threshold of the sapling door. But she digs in her heels and she does not tremble, not Faye—for Faye is not only as willful as a willow root, she is as brave as a bramble. And she will not go back through the door, no, she won't. All the bees in the world, all the bees in any other world, could not make her. Go ahead and try, she says, go ahead and try. They could sting her to death if they liked, and she would not budge. Why should she go back? It was her door. She had made it to enter this world and when she felt like it, and only then, she'd use it to go home. But not before.

  But the biggest bee, the bee that has been Mr. Honig, does a truly ghastly thing. He does something that cows even Faye. He calls on the name of Manitou. Faye slaps at Mr. Honig—but misses. She would rend him limb from limb if he were still a traveling man. She would swallow him whole. Faye is furious in her fear. She backs up a step, taking all the bees with her. But she knows she's doomed, knows it at the name of Manitou, for now she feels something old and cold and timeless and bold touch her soul. And she senses what it is immediately. It is her own true body, her own true form, checked on the other side of the door like a cloak in a cloakroom, returned to her.

  Faye opens her mouth, a huge mouth suddenly sprung with an orange gumful of crooked yellow teeth, big teeth, long teeth, poin
ted. She howls. A howl that fills up West Hackmatack Street with the Windigo's daughter she was, the Windigo's daughter she is once again, the Windigo's daughter she will ever be.

  What’s waiting for me in the tower, aside from the small child, the dog, and the hurdy-gurdy music, is a large box. No, not a box. It’s too handsome to be called merely a box. It’s a cabinet made of mahogany or walnut or some dark expensive wood, and inside it’s lined with polished metal. I can tell it’s lined with some sort of metal because one of the sides of the box is plate glass. Not only is it a cabinet, it’s a tank. It’s a tank full of water, and it’s suspended from the ceiling by a thick strong chain. Tears running down my face, I foolishly look for the fish. Goldfish, piranha, barracuda, whatever. Of course there are no fish. Over the tank, and between it and the ceiling attachments, hangs a kind of wooden arrangement which seems more like colonial stocks than a lid. It has two holes in it. So soon as I see the holes, I know it is not a lid; it really is a stocks. And I know what the holes are for. So does the child. For the first time I hear her speak. In a lilting childish lisp, she says, “It’s his ‘upside down.’ Up there is where he puts his feet. He hangs by his feet. You’re supposed to hang by your feet.”

  Why would I put my feet in the holes? Why would I hang by my feet in a tank of water? Who puts his feet in an “upside down”? But something about her voice hurts. It’s not Kate. It’s not Kate’s voice. The dog is not Prince. It’s not my Prince who died racing along behind the wheels of my bike. But it still hurts. It hurts every bit as much as if they were.

  Not getting any closer to the child or the dog than I can manage, I work myself around the hanging cabinet. On one side there’s a brassbound wooden ladder that leads up to the wooden stocks with the holes in it. Hanging above the stocks is the actual lid, a heavy wooden cover with chains dangling from it. And a huge padlock attached to a large link in the longest chain. The ladder explains how one gets up and into the tank and the padlock explains the insanity of doing it at all (he hangs from his feet upside down in a tank of water and allows himself to be padlocked in: oh god, of all the ways I’ve thought of killing myself, this one never once occurred to me, although I’ll give it this: it is a way to drown)…but I still can’t tell where the light in the tower is coming from. I can’t see a lighting fixture anywhere, but the light is a hard white light and makes everything too clear, too sharp, too real.

  Too horrid.

  If this is what I have chosen for myself, if this is how it ends, then not only am I insane, I am cruel. But am I, after all, Houdini?

  By now, I can’t see either the dog or the child. They’re both on the other side of the tank. But I can hear them. The dog is licking his chops, then panting, then licking his chops some more, and the child is still talking. She’s saying, “If you get in it like you’re s’posed to, you’ll drown. ‘Less you can get out. He can get out. Bet you can’t.”

  And all this time, the music plays on and on and I don’t know what it is, but she does. I don’t ask; I haven’t said a thing. She tells me the name of the song. “It’s called Asleep in the Deep. He plays it when he’s in his ‘upside down’.”

  With the name of the song said aloud, someone long ago and far away begins to sing. Loudly the bell in the old tower rings/Bidding us list to the warning it brings:/Sailor, take care! Sailor, take care!/Danger is near thee, beware!/Beware! Beware! Beware!/Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep,/So beware! Beware!

  I don’t ask who “he” is. I know who he is. He’s at a séance in the candle-lit drawing room in the roof house of Charles River Akeley, and for him it’s somewhere in the Nineteen Twenties. He has only a few years to live, but apparently he has forever to be dead.

  I may be insane. I may be suicidal. I’m really sorry to say that I am certainly homicidal—although killing wasn’t something I aspired to growing up. I grew up wanting to be safe, to be admired, to be loved. We all want that, though few of us kill to get it. But River House is haunted. As I said, I may be insane, but I’m not a fool. It’s in the Forties, and Louise Brooks is in my room drinking and reading and deciding to write because writers don’t kill themselves. It’s sometime in the Twenties: Harry Houdini is up in the roof house attending a séance that eternally cheeses him off, while HP Lovecraft stands at a lower window imagining another of his ghastly stories. On the second floor, Alfred Hitchcock is making movies in the late Fifties. Maybe Cole Porter’s here and maybe he isn’t. But someone is, and that someone is playing his music. Shirley Jackson sees River House as Hill House. It’s the early Sixties and she’s hallucinating in her room which must be my room since she’s climbing my stairs. The stairs are really here; they exist in one version or another in one version or another of River House. Shirley found hers. I found mine. Because of the stairs, Shirley wrote The Haunting of Hill House. I’m not Shirley Jackson who never wrote a bad sentence. I’m not Louise Brooks who, whether she gave a shit or not, became an icon of early Hollywood. I’m not Alfred Hitchcock who made movies that will be seen by people a hundred years from now. I’m not Lovecraft who wasn’t that great a writer, but who was a first rate fabulist.

  But I might just be Houdini.

  ~

  I can see out the tall bowed-top window, the one I’m standing nearest. Of the four, it’s the east facing window, the one that looks directly out over the Connecticut River. I can’t see much of anything, it’s so dark, so quiet, the light is so bright in the tower, the glass in the one hundred and forty-four year old window too warped and wavy. Whoever or whatever I saw the day I went swimming in the river had to have stood right here. Stood right here and looked down at me wet and dripping on the island. Was the cabinet hanging here then? Was the music playing?

  Right about now, the mood I’m in, which is a mix of helpless terror, advancing madness, and abject resignation, I imagine it was someone taking a break from the ongoing séance over in Akeley’s place.

  The child is still speaking. Over and over, she says, “Get in the tank. Get in the tank. Get in the tank.” It’s become a little Shirley Temple song, not an order, but a jingle.

  It’s hopeless. I begin to climb what I think is my last ladder.

  ~

  I not only took his heart, I took his head. But though I kept his heart—after all, he said it was mine, he gave it to me—I did not keep his head. I left his head where it belonged, in the pond where she died. It’s there now, feeding the goldfish, and there it will stay. Someone someday will find it, but not for a long long time. When Kate died, our neighbors said they would drain the pond, dig it up, destroy it. But we both said no, no, please…it’s Kate’s pond. Please don’t punish the pond. It’s the last place she ever saw. And how do we know if she knew Glory there? How do we know if as she died she spoke to the fish and they to her? We know so little of life and of death, how do we know what her dying was like?

  We begged them to keep the pond. We said it’s a beautiful pond. An old pond. There’s a mermaid of blue stone there, her tail trailing in the water. There are water lilies that spread out petals like clotted white cream, their centers the delicate pink of Kate’s skin. There’s pond weed through which from time to time one can see the golden fish flash by.

  On the surface, like green lace, there’s duck weed.

  They kept the pond. They will keep the pond. The house has been theirs for years, and it shall no doubt be theirs for many more years. They are old Malibu money, there before the rich and their “colony” shouldered out the beach. They will not sell the house.

  His head will stay where it is. Maybe not yet, but in time it will be a palace for fish who will swim in and out of his eyes, flicking their golden tails.

  ~

  At the top of the ladder, there’s a small platform. Somehow I know it’s here Houdini would stand and allow himself to be handcuffed, straight-jacketed, and have his bare feet placed through the mahogany stocks, which were then clamped and locked into position. So soon as that was done, the stocks would careful
ly be drawn up, taking an upside down, trussed up and manacled Houdini along with it, until he dangled headfirst and seemingly helpless over the open tank. Then it would be slowly slowly lowered and lowered until almost his entire body would be submerged, his head almost touching the bottom of the water-filled tank. To make it all that much worse, that much more dramatic, a wooden lid would be lowered onto the top of the tank, and padlocked shut. At this point someone would draw a curtain around the cabinet. The audience could no longer see Houdini, but they could hear him struggling to release himself. It took two whole breathless minutes, but in time, every time, he’d appear from around the back of the water-filled cabinet, dripping wet, exhausted, freed of each of his bonds, and triumphant.