After a sleepless night I walked down a cobbled alley, through the early morning fog, toward Butler square. Across from a fountain, I found a sullied coffee shop with sidewalk tables. I sat down. I ordered a cup of tea and a scone, and sipped and nibbled at this small nourishment afforded me, and I watched the activity in the square; homeless men collecting cans, pigeons scouring the sidewalk for food, old Hmong women carting their produce to market.
He came out of the church. Or was it an opium den? Maybe a whore house? Regardless, he wore a tall black top hat, a black overcoat, and silver cufflinks pinning together the stiffly starched cuffs of garments he could have been buried in. He walked with a cane now. I wondered when that had come about.
He slowly made his way across the square, around the fountain, trailing a long extended white finger through the pools, and then came towards me. Stopping at my table, he tipped his hat. “May I join you?”
“Of course,” I said, sliding out the chair with my foot. I peered into the gaunt face of Artaud, hardly believing it was him, but knowing nobody else would visit me on this of all mornings.
He ordered a cup of coffee, black, and sipped it, the cup rattling against the saucer, as his hands shook. He never did get past the addiction, even though he denied himself the pleasure of indulgence. “I need to speak with you about your writing.”
“What writing?” I asked.
“Exactly. We’ve been waiting for you to take it up again. You left the story in mid sentence thirteen years ago.”
“We?”
He looked at me. Those black obsidian eyes, wet, glistening. “Your audience, your mentors, your influences, however you wish to name those of us who have gone before, those of us who watch with a parent’s care your every move, your every word. We send you messages, you know. I guess you don’t know; you stopped listening long ago. We speak through signs and symbols that are not typically interpreted, though you once saw them for what they were.”
I knew exactly of what he spoke, but feigned ignorance. How could I have missed the messages? But if I had missed them all, if I had turned a deaf ear or a blind eye, then perhaps that would grant me an excuse for this failure, this grand and blasphemous catastrophe for which I would become infamous in the grand gallery. My portrait held only a silhouette of a man, faintly resembling me.
Artaud began to chuckle. His laughter grew until his entire body shook and he began to cough, spilling his coffee. I peered into the splash of dark liquid in the saucer, seeing nothing less than the pools of Lethe, drawn in so that I only faintly heard his remonstrance. Was this another message?
“You have toyed with your talent like an insufferable child. We have permitted you these lapses, hoping each would give you strength of character and emotion, but you emerged without a scratch on that impenetrable conscience of yours. We have waited for growth but see that you are still but a child sucking on your pacifier, too comfortable in your swaddling clothes. What are you waiting for? You have the story, you have in Krista your audience, and she has given you the deadline of three weeks in which to deliver her something of your writing. You have excommunicated your wife from the garden, so that nothing disturbs you. As you poise yourself within the gallery, your vocal cords seize up and only a nervous stutter issues from your chest.”
“What stories are you talking about? I don’t have any.” All of my puppets lay dead at the end of their strings. The props had burned. The hall was empty.
“The Tea House. It intrigues us, it—“
“There you go again with ‘us’. Who besides you has been prying into my life?”
“You know the idols. Mr. Mojo Risin’, Rimbaud, Darger. Who do you love? Who loves you for what you could be?”
I didn’t know the answer to that. At what point did I stop worshipping? Nothing is more forsaken than a man without his idols.
I spent the morning severely admonished by Artaud until, weary, I tried to take my leave of him. But you can’t so easily outdistance a ghost, even one as lame and infirm as Artaud. In my flat, sitting at the desk and staring out the bleary window upon the street, he came out from the shadows, pulled out a chair and sat heavily with a sigh. This time, he offered encouragement, however. And somewhere, just beyond the shadows at the corners of the room, I knew the others lingered, watching, listening, urging us forward. The Tea House story, he said, so harmless, so subtle, but it represented its own oasis of idols. The tea house was another outpost on the perimeter, though less recognizable; If I would only step up.
“So why not start it? Tomorrow night, start the Tea House. Who cares if it’s good at this point. Anything would be good. You have to start again, wherever your starting point may be, to make progress to your ultimate end. And you know what that destination is. You’ve always known, even though you won’t speak of it, except in dreams.”
And with that he withdrew, quietly receding into the shadows until he was swallowed like the dregs of my tea, and alone in the quiet room I saw a blank page before me.
