In the small screening room of the hotel, Donnie Darko had already begun. It was another favorite of Sandy Pearlman. We once sat in his van and watched it at a small makeshift drive-in theatre in Austin, Texas, after the twilight spectacle of thousands of bats exiting a labyrinth of caves and filling the sky. It’s all about frequencies, he had said. I remember dozing off during the film and this evening fared no better; there were only a few other patrons and it seemed we were all drifting in and out of sleep, avoiding the metallic stare of the dark bunny.
I missed the ending and felt slightly agitated as I walked through the empty halls of the hotel. Back in my room I was delighted to find a plate of oatmeal cookies and a pot of nettle tea. Anonymous comfort food. I sat on the easy chair at the foot of the bed thinking about the conversation I had earlier with the Secretary. It seemed to me that the lion’s share of our exchange occurred in silence, though somehow her thoughts spread easily before me. I saw her sitting by a window with a heavy heart. I saw the walls closing in, like six-foot snow drifts in the Midwest after a February storm. I heard the silence reigning over the countryside. I felt the pain of leave taking, and gazed at an empty study where dust formed on the shelves.
These brief glimpses of her were melancholy but impossible to interpret. But the references to John Nash intrigued me. I had absolutely accessed his image, grainy and pixilated, through her as she was murmuring under her breath. Unbeknownst to her, I had harbored an inexplicable attachment to Nash even though we had never met, though I couldn’t recall speaking of him with the Secretary. He was still alive then and I was truthfully hoping to visit him in Princeton to photograph his hands. He had beautiful hands. The hands of a pianist—long, strong, and sensitive.
I wondered if John Nash was indeed the emperor of whom she spoke. I suddenly recalled that he had once declined a post at the University of Chicago because he was scheduled to be the Emperor of Antarctica. His explanation was attributed to a form of madness by those of the mathematics community. But perhaps a truth here, wherever here is. I decided to ask the Secretary; she would surely tell me in words or thoughts. I would also tell her that I had dreamed of Nash, once in the last century and again in 2015 following his death in a tragic accident.
In the first, I dreamed of his hands, that seemed the hands of a musician, or an athlete, and his face with a thousand lines, and I saw him smile, not with his mouth, but with his eyes. A myopic smile, yet containing infinite wisdom.
And I dreamed of him only days after his death. I dreamed that we were waltzing within a blossoming phantasmagoria, as if generating from the kaleidoscopic mind of Busby Berkeley. We danced and everything was of him, the steadfast snow refusing to melt, the floral lace refusing to die. We turned slowly then sat for a while beneath a trestle of glories. The white wrought iron chairs were filigreed like the Queen Anne’s lace we had lightly trampled. Just before us was a long winding path and we watched a procession of those of the distant past with wondrous minds. Joseph Knecht was among them, and Bernhard Riemann, no longer wracked with consumption, and Polonaise, and Camille Claudel, who strayed from them to examine a gleaming boulder. She ran her hand over its surface. No work today, she smiled, it’s already perfect. And this lovely distraction caused me to drift from him. He had risen to join them, disappearing into a wide shaft of light, steadily diffusing.
When I awoke I felt the loss of him, and wanted to weep, but instead I began to draw. I did not draw his face nor the hands I had so admired. I drew entrances and exits, the facets of jewels. I opened envelopes and drew the flaps, deconstructed paper airplanes. I felt I knew something of his mind that another would not know nor comprehend, and attempted to translate his mystical secret abstractly. Perhaps the Secretary also knew this secret. I would ask her and hopefully discover whether I had unknowingly entered the realm of the emperor, and to what purpose, long before I was summoned.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free