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Lacking Character
1.

—after E.T.A. Hoffmann

What follows is a story of contagion, and it begins, as all such stories must, with a message both obscure and appalling.

The city in which this message was passed was the city of N— in the geographic center of Illinois, and, as the saying goes, in the middle of nowhere. N— was notable as a place that had succeeded in achieving the destiny American cities had sought for centuries: complete abstraction. As the German mystic Jacob Boehme once observed, “It is not philosophers who are abstract, it is the man in the street.” Actually, this story with its embedded message happened at least three times, in various places, but on the same spring date, as if this world were only a quarrelsome device like one of those old brightly painted tin toys that you’d wind up and watch as a dog jumped on a wagon and back, on a wagon and back, in that false infinity provided by winding a spring tightly.

The first time it happened was in 1810, in Dresden, as later attested to in a most remarkably vivid account by the gnomish writer of realist fantasy E.T.A. Hoffmann, in his story “Mademoiselle de Scuderi.” Then it all fell out again in 1910, in Paris, on the edge of the first modern war. Picasso and Braques were hanging out, drinking yellow-green absinthe, and then enjoying hallucinations at that new sensation, the Bijou, the florid cinema. While they enjoyed such bohemian pleasures, the second coming of these remarkable events lit the air around their heads, the most brilliant heads of a most brilliant time, but, sadly, not even they noticed. They were painters, after all, and perhaps not open to the “unfolding” of things across vast stretches of time. That I know of, there is no record of the events happening elsewhere either (although I once imagined, wrongly as it turned out, that there were cryptic allusions to them in Franz Kafka’s story “The Warden of the Tomb”). The third time that this story unfolded itself, as if the very air could open up like a Chinese paper box, was in 2010. Then, the residents of one house in N— were awakened from that self-satisfied sleep of the Midwest by a mad pounding at the door.

As it happened, all the women of the house were away sex-touring and ganja-smoking in Jamaica. The men had been left behind with strict instructions to lock the doors and ignore the baying of hounds. The men wondered if this pounding at the door was what the women meant by “the baying of hounds,” so they went cautiously to an upstairs window.

“Open the door, for God’s sake, open the door,” a man’s voice said, rising up above the sublime pounding he was giving to the door.

“Who is down there?” the men asked. “We know better than that, Mister. We were warned not to open the door to strangers.”

“I must speak to the Marquis!”

“The Marquis? I think you have the wrong house. Try that big one at the end of the block.”

“For God’s sake, it’s a matter of life and death. I stand falsely accused…of an atrocity.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?!”

And down they went and unbolted the great oak portal.

No sooner had they opened the door than a figure wrapped in a flowing black cloak burst through violently, eyes wild, a man with the intensity of a demon!

“It’s no wonder that you’ve been accused of an atrocity. Just look at yourself!”

The men now thoroughly regretted opening the door. One of them said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow at a decent hour?”

“Does destiny care for the time of day?” the man in the black garb asked.

They had no opinion on the matter.

“Why, then, if you won’t take me, take this, and give it to the Marquis.”

And he held an envelope aloft.