Fantastic Metropolis

You knock on Wagner’s door thirty-some-odd years ago and it is just past eight and raining violently and you are under the impression you have been invited to a busy soirée but your father answers and from what you can tell he is alone. He is tall and slim and dressed in Wagner’s outlandish Dutch painter’s costume: chocolate velvet jacket, knee-breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, Rembrandt beret, blue cravat. Behind him the hall is silent and empty and lit by a single candle. He looks over your shoulder as if he is expecting someone more important than you to come up the walkway and so you look too but there is no one there and you are wearing a shabby suit because it is the best you can afford. Your tongue is not your tongue and your teeth are not your teeth and your stomach is not your stomach; you are borrowing them from a very sick man who barely hangs on to life in someone else’s dream. You have come to meet Wagner who wants to make the acquaintance of the bright young philologist he heard about during a recent visit to Basel only you find yourself facing your father. Giving birth, he is telling you with great affection while looking over your shoulder, is the production of proof concerning the parents’ inadequacies, and then he turns his back on you and wanders down the silent empty hall and you hesitate before you follow him. He leads you to an elegant drawing room that is only slightly larger than a closet. There are no windows. Or perhaps there are windows but they have been covered over with the satin wallpaper. It is very dark. Your stomach hurts. A large stuffed-leather chair and miniature grand piano atop which rests another candle comprise the only furniture. It is so confined in this closet-room and the air so thick with Wagner’s patchouli perfume that it is difficult to draw a breath and your father indicates the chair and you sit down and his back is still to you. You address him with a few words of respect, respect and love, telling him he looks extremely good for a dead man, that he looks extremely good and that you miss him very much. You remember, you say, how he was liked and welcomed everywhere for his conversation and genuine kindness. Your father drifts away while you are talking and hunches down at the piano, knees up by his ears, and speaks quickly, cutting you off, telling you if he had lived he would be the same age Wagner is now and please open your mouth. His back is to you and he bangs out several parts from the Meistersinger, imitating each voice with great exuberance, then stops without warning and leaps off the bench and opens it and rummages around inside and comes up with a manuscript so fat it could never have fit in there except somehow it has. It is, you can see, Wagner’s autobiography. He sits again, his back to you, and begins reading and every few sentences interrupts himself to tell you to please open your mouth. You tell him that you miss him very much and that the first five years of your life, the years he was alive, were among your happiest. Does he recall, you ask, that Saturday morning he said out of the blue it is time to learn how to fish and took you on horseback into the countryside? You sat in front of him in the saddle balancing his rod and tackle and everything was true and the sun felt like when you crouch directly in front of the fireplace on a winter’s night. No, he says, he doesn’t. Your stomach hurts and he continues reading, interrupting himself every few sentences and telling you to please open your mouth. He is not, you realize before long, reading about Wagner’s past. He is reading about Wagner’s future. He is telling you how Wagner will in time come to exhibit the Christian pathology. Your father winces when he pronounces these words. Be careful, he says. They’re hot. After Parsifal, Wagner’s work will bloat with hysterical women. Its flesh will drop off. It will turn sticky, then histrionic, then pretentious. He that humbleth himself, your father says, wants to be exalted. He winces and is on his feet again, agitated, and the pages of the manuscript are scattered across the floor as if a heavy wind has blown through the room and he is standing next to your chair. His back is still to you but he reaches out behind him and discovers your face and feels along its topography as if he were sightless. When he reaches your lips he strokes them with his forefinger and then gently slips a digit between them and tells you to please open your mouth. You hesitate and he pushes a little and you instinctively resist and then he is prying your jaws apart by forcing his first three fingers between your upper and lower front teeth. You ask him to stop, you try to ask him to stop, but your mouth is full of him and he is touching each of your teeth as if each were a beautiful pearl that could reverse time. He sightlessly examines each with his fingers, enjoys it, and you are progressively interested in his touch until he grips your left incisor with the strength of a pair of pliers and begins to unscrew. You balk and your hands shoot up to stop him but you are no match for his power and the first tooth is already out and the inside of your mouth is bloody. His back is to you and your stomach hurts and he takes your tooth and raises it to his own mouth and you can see him huddle over it as he inserts it with a wet grinding sound like roots twisted in mud. Then he reaches behind him and begins to caress your lips again. His fingertips tickle and he forces your jaws apart a second time and his fingers eel around inside your mouth searching for another tooth and they choose an upper molar and grasp it and unscrew it and then that one is in him too. He repeats this gesture twenty-six times. Afterward, he turns around and his mouth is smeared with your blood. Your gums are pocked with slimy holes. Then your father tells you to please open your mouth. He has some difficulty articulating the words because of his new set of teeth. He tells you to please open your mouth and when you do not he reaches out and runs a hand through your hair tenderly and then down the side of your face and when he reaches your lips he pauses and next three fingers are inside your mouth and you are having trouble taking in air. He inserts three fingers inside your mouth and then he inserts four and his whole fist is in you and you are convinced your jaw muscles will tear. You are convinced your jaw muscles will tear and your jawbone will shatter and you are gagging because he is forcing his fist down your throat. He exerts steady, insistent, affectionate pressure and his pink-smeared lips are close to your right ear as he goes about his business. His left arm is braced against your chair for support. He exerts steady, insistent, affectionate pressure and next his arm is up to the elbow inside you and the joint presents a temporary problem but your father braces himself against your chair and then he shoves with great vigor and then you feel his fingers wadding up your stomach sac from the inside and then his arm is slowly withdrawing and your stomach is coming with it.

What I have given you, your father is whispering kindheartedly as he goes about his business, I have come to take back.

What is yours has always been mine…

You listen with interest and come to appreciate that this reclamation may take quite some time and so you prepare to settle into your chair and make yourself comfortable while trying and succeeding to love your father a little harder every second your consciousness remains intact.