Nipkow's Ghost (continued)
Disk 10
DISK 10
—Summer night with Dulcinea/Wong Under The Wok/Encounter with the Fortune-Teller (JS)
A few minutes after the meeting, Dulcinea would come down with a look I had never seen before. It excited me and elated me. It was a fine day. It's strange how years can fly by in a blur of non-recognition, a fusion of days and weeks and months and yet a single emotionally laden meeting and coupling can remain starkly visible in your memory for decades, with every instantaneous moment brightly illuminated in sequential detail. The particulars are so chronologically exact and accurate that one can rewind and fast forward the sequence at one's leisure, recalling every halting and momentary exchange of conversation, every fleeting facial expression, the faintest touch, and even the unmistakable scent that was wafting in the air, the ambient temperature, and the direction of the breeze. The walk to Chinatown from the Central library on that summer night to celebrate my first month of work at the TMA is one of those nights. It is registered indelibly and forever.
Memory is so feeble. The years of arduous exertion and work to renovate and update the TMA, to reorganize its departments, to oversee a whole new technical and computing environment and to implement a new “80s style” videotape-enhanced TV watching, which I pioneered, on a resistant and intransigent staff, is all a single blurry indistinguishable recollection now; all of the endless fights with entrenched bureaucracy, dealing with the crazy industrial defense industry and the Big State mandates from executives who had never spent a good day in front of a Sony Trinitron television doing hard sitcom watching, are lost to memory. All of the frustration and exasperation I had experienced has left no trace of bitterness. The constant and continuous draining and idiotic redirection of my energies to ever new and more nebulous and menacing threats that were popping up left, right and center is all obliterated; all of the thousands of hours of vetting a staff which had long since been compromised by every foreign intelligence agency and renegade operator and freelancer on the planet; the painful weaning of our finances away from commercial work by rapacious vested interests, fighting for resources in the face of ever-changing Cold War priorities, it has all been lost. I can barely even recall all the steps I took to fight an ever enlarging cyberwar, a word that had not yet been invented but which we referred to back then in the 70s by the quaint term as cybernetic intrusion and attack, using the great Norbert Wiener's vocabulary. All of the threatening vectors from places not yet known but nonetheless suspected which I diligently cataloged are only faint recollections. It is so very hard to even remember the most general events, while consulting my day-timer, my notes and my diaries. Memory is a kind of reconstruction of the past, even remembering one’s own immediate past requires large patches of reconstructive interpolation and enhancement to make any sense of.
However, and in sharp contradistinction, that special summer evening with Dulcinea is as present to me in my mind's eye as the very night I experienced it. How could I forget it? It was unforgettable. She appeared on time in front of the Central Library on 5th Avenue. I had put on one of my recently purchased but unworn evening outfits. I felt somewhat uncomfortable putting on a suit that telegraphed so much macho character and cool but it felt good once I got into it. The suit was a kind of burnt orange color and Dulcinea had picked out a matching ivory turtleneck sweater woven in super light cotton that felt soft against my skin. I thought she would like to see me in it, which was my principal motivation for putting it on. And there she was waiting for me. What a sight! She was dressed in hip hugging bell bottom denim jeans, and a tight tie-dyed t-shirt under a black leather jacket into which she had embedded sterling silver studs around the collar and in stripes down both sides.
Her hair was in a long ponytail that fell down her back. Her height always amazed me, and with the high heels accentuating an already show-stealing look, she bedazzled me yet again. She greeted me warmly but without any exchange or any obligatory cheek kisses. Her physical aloofness momentarily disturbed my silly expectations. I couldn't for some reason take my attention off of her shoes, which she noticed. They were a gorgeous and fluorescent red that set off against her flared blue jeans spectacularly. Spurred by my interest she quickly modeled them for me, “You like?” she asked. “Sie sind Bottega Veneta. I traded an 18 inch solid gold chain for these shoes.” I knew nothing about women's shoes back then and I still don't know the designers' names to this day, but I realize now that those shoes probably cost more than my monthly salary at the TMA. Frankly, I could barely bring myself to look at her in any kind of serious way even after all of these months. We were practically living together or at least sharing the same space and she would sometimes change in dangerous proximity to me, hidden by nothing more than a flimsy partition, but I had still not given her a once over.
I could only guess at her measurements or weight or the exact size of her waist; it was still something of an imaginative project for me to fully understand what she looked like in that I would only take quick glances and her eyes usually caught me in a kind of trance which I could not break. This is all very strange given the amount of time I spent imagining, fantasizing and thinking about her. I was left in a really confusing place wondering what was real and was a product of my over fervid imagination. I was too timid to really look at her. Countless random passerby and thousands of anonymous cab drivers probably had a better idea of her figure or her measurements or relative physical virtues than me. I wouldn't look. I could not look. Today was a bit different. I somehow got up the nerve to look at her back side by pretending to be stumbling for something in my pockets and gesturing to her that I was moving forward with her in step, when in fact I was falling back a step or two, trying to catch a glimpse of her derriere.
My eye immediately caught the insignia on the Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in the embroidered box on her right cheek, and the copper studs outlining the pockets. My glance quickly took in as much as I could before I felt the fast and sudden and sharp gaze of Dulcinea, who was well aware of my clumsy stratagem. Her raised eyebrow look and her expression of I know what you're doing, embarrassed me and caused me to mutter something about my keys and to make pretend gestures like I had lost something. She generously allowed my failed act of finesse to pass and I was very careful for the rest of the walk, making sure my eyes did not stray and trying desperately to pretend that I didn't deliberately do what I did, by putting on a mock stage act that was a desperate effort to cover my tracks. It failed to fool her however but did work to further embarrass me. I remained fixated on that 70s denim look for the rest of my life. Denim and the full history of the influence of this body-enhancing fabric on the 20th century has yet to be written. Amazingly, blue jeans were able to wipe out almost all class distinctions. All of the philosophy and claptrap about equality and democracy could not do what denim had done in the space of ten years. Blue jeans and denim clad youngsters were in the forefront of a new kind of living revolution and it was intersecting with rock ‘n’ roll music and the downtown scene that was about to change everything, literally everything. Everyone is brought to the same level in denim and as Andy Warhol declared, “I want to die in my blue jeans.” You could call that the epitaph of our times.
How well I remember that warm summer night. That hour-long walk from the Central Library down 5th Avenue to Union Square and along 4th to Cooper Square and on to Chinatown. Dulcinea's ambling, teasing, physically suggestive sway which would not give up with her long arms wildly gesticulating, and her constant and highly-animated bantering about different matters, dazzling everyone. As we cut through the Friday night crowd, throngs of both men and women stopped to stare and gawk. I for once, felt not incongruous, but part of the floating picture. I was still growing, almost five foot eleven inches tall myself by that age, not in terrible shape, but still four or so inches shy of Dulcinea in those heels. Nevertheless, I still cut a pretty solid figure. We accentuated each other. I flattered myself that we looked like an attractive young couple, masters of the universe, ‘beautiful people’ both of us looked about twenty, Dulcinea might have been twenty-two at most, in the prime of our lives and youth with the sex appeal that goes with it, an age that holds a special magic that everyone can feel. I also caught for the first time in my life a couple of young girls looking at me with some physical interest if not desire or at least some kind of intrigue and illicit curiosity. Perhaps this was just the reflected attention that one gets by being with a beautiful woman. Regardless, it felt new and intoxicating.
As we moved towards Chinatown, various street characters and vagrants kept calling out her street name—Destiny, Hey Destiny, Destiny, Destiny, Where are you at Destiny? Remember me Destiny? Give me a taste of Destiny. Shine on me Destiny. It was like a mantra wherever we went. She would reply to those she knew, some she just ignored or sloughed off; each person that greeted her had a story and a history that would bring a smile to her face, or a frown or a head movement of disbelief or a chuckle. She knew all of the usual suspects, it seemed. She was a little over twenty but she was already becoming something of legend amongst all of the hustlers, streetwalkers, beggars and misfits, conmen and dealers, and the artistic demimonde of the bohemian subculture of the Lower East Side. Everyone knew her or recognized her. She was striking and fearless. Even the gangsters and mafiosos cut her some slack and would show the occasional courtesy and polite deference. And this was before all the wealth and art and the fashion statements she would make in subsequent years and decades. It was well known, I would learn years later, amongst all of the artists and filmmakers and writers that Daryl Hannah who would emerge later in the 80s was marked for fame due to her close resemblance and appearance to Dulcinea and was cast knowingly in such films as Blade Runner and Kill Bill, with all of her demonstrable martial prowess.
We kept walking along Bleeker Street to Elizabeth Street and finally to a restaurant called Wong’s Wok that was to become a favorite of mine after opening a newer, more inviting Upper West Side location. ‘Under the Wok,’ as it was known back then, was a strange and sketchy place, to say the least. A seafood restaurant that was a three-generation family affair with a long established base in Chinatown, it was somehow familiar to Dulcinea. There were always quite a few Chinese people in the restaurant, which Dulcinea said was a good sign, although her exposure to Chinese food was not as extensive as mine. Chinese food was treated by Long Island people of my ilk and persuasion as an exclusive ethnic Sino-Judeo Cuisine. But this was certainly a different crowd down here. Dulcinea simply said one word as she looked at the clientele at one table, Triads, judging by their tattoos. I hadn't heard that word Triad nor was I familiar with the underworld symbols and meanings of tattoos. There was a mix of other patrons as well, students from Columbia University energetically discussing various subjects, a couple of Upper West or Upper East Side families and various tourists and scattering of other people.
What was unusual about the restaurant were the dozens of fish tanks; these tanks were full of eels, lobsters, octopuses, various types of crustaceans, clams, oysters, and many bizarre multi-coloured glowing fish and dozens of other aquatic species. Many of these exotic fish were certainly on endangered lists or were definitely illegal to bring into the United States. One tank had a coiled octopus which when fully spread out might have had a reach of four or five feet. The cruelty of trapping this extraordinary creature filled me with revulsion. Never mind the disgusting thought that someone may actually eat such a magnificent animal. The tanks lined every wall and every free square foot of space. There was arguably a more diverse selection of species and life-forms in this restaurant than at the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West where I had spent countless days and weeks. I was quite interested in exotic fish and had been ever since I was a child. I wondered if this restaurant was in fact a front, perhaps for some kind of trade in banned rare fish which I had read was a thriving business in Chinatown.
These creatures did not all look to be of the eating kind. The tanks gurgled and bubbled as oxygenated air surfaced from the tanks and filled the restaurant with a giddy and a high level of O2 saturation. Various types of black lamps and other lights were focused on the tanks. Occasionally, a Chinese cook would emerge from the kitchen to grab a lobster with pincers or a net to catch some other kind of fish. One could hear very disturbing and disconcerting squeals as living creatures were immersed in boiling water or kindly introduced to some boiling hot cooking oil in a frying pan. The violent and sudden sound of a butcher knife connecting with a wooden cutting board provided an additional and unwanted indicator as to what was going on in the kitchen. If I was not mistaken, there seemed to be cages containing other types of animals in the kitchen as well.
Indeed it operated, in fact, as a kind of illegal wet market. A lot of banned contraband was traded here on the street level and in the underground warrens beneath the restaurant. None of this escaped my suspicions, and by underground I truly mean the underground. Dulcinea referred to it as ‘Under the Wok,’ for good reason. ‘Wong’s’ was actually connected through a network of tunnels to much of Chinatown. The younger Wong working the cash register was not much older than me, but his fidgety and nervous behavior caught my attention. He was clearly up to no good. I thought I saw him pocketing money from the cash register on a few occasions and there were constant disputes in Cantonese with the customers; the gist of the disputes was that the dinner bills rendered were obviously dubious in their accuracy and arithmetic. Extra dish charges. An enlarged drinking tab. Seven bowls of steam rice when only five were served and so on and so forth.
Younger Wong was anxious and self-conscious. Odd people would come in and out and pick up packages or what looked to be special fish in large clear plastic bags. Young Wong's ancient one-hundred-year-old grandfather however looked at him with a hard, cold expressionless stare that never deviated. His gaze was baleful and suspicious; the grandfather, however, said not a word as his grandson would often shoot him scowling and threatening glances and occasionally send him frightful gestures with his hands. His mother and father were too busy nagging and fighting with each other and the cooks in some mixed patois of highly-unpleasant sounding Cantonese to pay both grandfather and grandson any attention. Young Wong looked jittery as it seemed that he was not unfamiliar with Dulcinea and this appeared to worry him. However, Dulcinea did not give off a hint of any recognition or concern. Some of the Chinese hoodlums, trying to imitate the gestures of their more dangerous and experienced Sicilian competitors, gave Dulcinea a hard look up and down in a display of machismo that was not to be outdone by a further exchange of some crude and vulgar epithets between them, in their distinctive street argot which could not be disguised despite the language gap. I didn't think any of this was lost on Dulcinea and it slightly marred the occasion and what she had planned. The YoungWong was already on a path of crime and mischief, a path that would be inextricably fated to my own. I can't digress into that complex situation, suffice it to say that Wong would mature into a diabolical and duplicitous character whose allegiances were never entirely clear.
Anyway, not much of this really or truly distracted me to any great extent. The only thing that distracted me and totally preoccupied me was Dulcinea. I was gluttonous to know more about her, to spend time with her and to somehow woo her. Her secrets, her mystery and intrigue were part of what attracted me to her in the first place. We were there to celebrate my one month anniversary of starting at the TMA. I had not only started but I had established myself as a favorite of Campbell. Whispers that he wanted to groom me as a future key executive were being bandied about. I think Dulcinea had spoken to Campbell and knew something more than I did about his plans. I wasn't particularly curious. I was mostly flattered and felt that the executive job at TMA increased my overall confidence and my financial independence, and fixed my place in the firmament of New York media and most of all would allow me to make a better impression on Dulcinea.
For once, I did not feel like a callow and inexperienced teenage boy in the face of this incredible vampster girl. How I yearned for her but feared her. I fretted and worried that I would never get a chance to touch her, never mind love her. I would shake my head at the impossibility of this challenge night after night. Why couldn't I figure out a few first steps, I asked myself. How hopeless can I be? She just seemed so unobtainable even though I practically lived with her, or at least did for a few days a week. Where she spent the rest of her time or who her other so-called 'friends' were was a complete mystery to me. I suspected everyone and was often wracked with jealousy but with no object at which to direct my suspicions this expenditure of emotion simply exhausted me. Not a good situation at a basic psychological level, I told myself.
We ordered a mixed combination of dishes. Dulcinea had a strange set of dietary rules. She was not exactly a vegetarian and she was not Kosher either. But she didn't eat ham or bacon or pork, and she would not consume milk and meat at the same time. Eating in a Chinese restaurant is not conducive to sticking to these rules I pointed out. The dishes were a mix of Dim Sum, a new kind of cuisine which I had only been introduced to since moving to Manhattan and the usual sweet and sour stuff. Shrimp of all sorts, although hardly kosher, seemed to be one of her favorites and we ordered that and some nice spring rolls, a mixed vegetable dish, fish in garlic sauce, a spicy noodle dish, some Hunan-style chicken, and a plate of egg fried rice. There was a lot of food for the two of us. I ordered more than I thought we could eat so we could spend more time together. It was my treat and I had cashed my first bi-monthly check which was more than I had earned in the last two years working for my father part-time. I felt flush with money. Ordering a few extra dishes would have previously broken my wallet and budget for the month, but not tonight.
Just after we ordered the dishes and as a way of commemorating the night, Dulcinea said she had something for me, something special! I was entirely unprepared by what she was about to give me and the importance that she attached to the gift. I, of course, had not thought of buying her anything despite everything she had done for me, and all of the gifts and generosity. Idiotically, the idea of buying her a gift escaped me. Even forty years later this still upsets me, this total lack of good judgment. I suppose, I had no experience seeing anyone ever give anyone a gift impulsively or romantically. I never witnessed this at home and I didn’t have the largesse and presence of mind at that time to understand how to woo or reach out to a special lady and what a difference a gift could make. I was hopelessly disarmed by it all. Here I was accepting but giving nothing.
Out of her bomber jacket she lovingly withdrew a leather case, aged quite a bit, maybe thirty or forty years-old. She opened it ever so carefully as if there was something inside that was very fragile and precious. I could see her eyes reddening and beginning to water. She opened it facing herself so I could only see the look on her face which was marked with pain, sadness and some hint of joy. She was both remembering what it had meant and at the same time preparing herself to say goodbye to it. It was precious to her and maybe in some way a burden which she wished to free herself from, something that needed to be put back rightfully to where it belonged. With that she slowly, very slowly, in fact, pivoted the case towards me so I could see what it was hiding. What she revealed was a magnificent wristwatch, a sight that startled me. It had a pink-gold face with a diamond embedded in its center on a dark black slightly-worn crocodile leather strap. It was a stunning piece.
I knew nothing about watches. My only exposure to any kind of watch was my twenty-dollar TIMEX which I got for my 13th birthday. The TIMEX was something I was extremely proud of. I thought it represented the acme of time pieces. This was something else altogether, however. The watch had belonged to her father and it was the only momento that connected her to him. It was freighted with a huge sentimental meaning and value to her. This was evident in the way she touched it and put it on me. She slowly put the strap around my wrist as if she was giving away her only child; the experience of her strong, dextrous fingers enrapturing my hand and wrist was itself incredibly sensual and pleasing and maybe she knew this because she took her time. I could feel her hands on my wrist. It was the most intimate act we had yet had, I would say, but I could not absorb everything. The strap had one worn line that marked her father’s wrist size, I assume. Coincidentally, it was the same size that I required; the exact same size. I could see that this coincidence was affecting her very deeply and she began to shake and tears began to stream down her face. Upon strapping the band she turned my wrist so I could see how it looked. She, at that point, held my forearm with both her hands and squeezed my arm with her thumbs on the top of and her fingers on the underside. She closed her eyes and for a long ten or fifteen seconds concentrated on something deeply. It was as if she was saying a prayer, or making some kind of wish for me. This long cherished watch was being relinquished and it was going to be a part of someone else’s life now. I was transfixed and frozen as I saw her metamorphose through various emotional states; her face hid nothing.
This was no ordinary watch. It was a 1940 IWC Schaffhausen Portuguese chronograph. What she called in German, a “Portugieser.” It was called a Portugieser not because it was made in Portugal but because apparently a couple of Portuguese watch merchants had gone to Switzerland, to the town of Schaffhausen in the late 1930s with a very special request. They wanted to order a wristwatch which had the same nautical precision and internal works as a pocket watch. So the Portuguese sporting watch represented a kind of landmark in watch design, another milestone in the timepiece revolution. It was for the times, an unusually large watch with a 43mm diameter. It had a streamlined dial with Arabic numbers, a very thin bezel which made it look even larger on the wrist and leaf hands, with a large sub-dial at six o’clock for the second hand. It was simply a gorgeous piece and probably a collector’s item of exceptional value.
It's been forty years since she graced me with this watch and it has never left my wrist. It has also never missed a beat or lost a minute of time over all of these years. Its feel and its weight on my left wrist has become at this point in my life part of my anatomy and proprioception; if I were to remove it I would fear that I would become unbalanced and disoriented, my center of balance and bodily symmetry thrown off. It is not only physically beautiful it is also part of my very psychological equilibrium. Its internal mechanical heartbeat and ticking second by second is a constant moment by moment reminder of my connection to Dulcinea and my responsibility to her and her mission.
I could see that Dulcinea was visibly upset and her face was flushed. Her tears had caused her eye makeup to run down her face in big black streaks. I suggested that maybe she wash up. She got up, stretching her long majestic legs. As she walked towards the restroom I noticed in my peripheral vision, that one of the larger gangsters, something of a bodybuilder, I suppose, got up and moved towards the men's room as well. The restrooms were at the other end of the restaurant and down a flight of stairs as if often the case in Chinatown. I thought nothing of the potential danger that a lady could face down in the basement. It didn't cross my mind that Dulcinea could be in any peril or that the Chinese gangster harbored any nefarious intent.
It was less than a minute before I heard a very audible loud bang, a door being slammed closed, and a metal on metal sound. This loud sound was followed by another hard bang and what sounded like a man groaning. There was then another sound of a heavy but soft mass hitting the floor, but it was not like it was a solid object but something softer, like a huge bag of jelly or possibly the body of a corpulent person. What happened, as Dulcinea would relate to me moments later, is that she had decided to use the lady's receptacle to do her business, and no sooner had she sat down than someone hand reached around to open the stall door. Dulcinea said she responded by kicking the door shut and squeezing the unwanted visitors fingers to a pulp. After holding his hand suspended there for about ten seconds she released it only to give the perpetrator the false expectation that he was over the worst pain. He was not so lucky. She merely released his fingers so that she could slam them again but much harder this time and she did not release his fingers for almost one minute. After this she slowly pulled up her trousers, the imaginary scene described sending me into an internal paroxysm of fantasy, which would be replayed mentally for months if not years.
Anyway, with her pant buckle and belt undone she exited the washroom stall at which point her deadly Triad gangster, now furiously angry and livid, pulled his switchblade out. To this, Dulcinea said, “ein fataler fehler,” meaning a big mistake. It wasn't more then a second before she had unraveled her famous fighting belt and fractured his hand with a quick whip followed by the coiling of the belt around his neck cobra style after which she smashed him to the floor with her previously demonstrated fighting skills. As he writhed on the floor she attended to her face and makeup. Turning to the moaning gangster, she put her fingers to her lips as if to say ‘quiet, no more crying now.’ Ten minutes later, he stumbled out of the bathroom hallway and veered around our table Dulcinea again motioned him, with her fingers to her lips, to indicate that he should be good and keep quiet. Right after reaching his table he waved his arms around to his fellow criminals to say, let's get the hell out of here. Even collectively they were not prepared to engage Dulcinea in a physical fight. Quentin Tarantino captured something of her ferocity in Kill Bill, although I found Uma Thurman’s imitated moves to be klutzy and lacking in gracefulness by comparison.
The food was to come and lead to a lengthy and very interesting three-hour conversation. Dulcinea questioned me with real interest as to what I was doing, what projects I was working on.
I explained that they had thrown at me a long and very complicated file related to an FBI investigation of L.E.M., as in Stanislaw Lem, instigated by none other than Philip K. Dick who had written a long accusatory letter to the Bureau suggesting that L.E.M was a codename for a deep Communist plot to infiltrate the West. That sci–fi was anything but another literary genre had never occurred to me. As I got further into my research, I realized that science fiction was indeed riddled with propaganda, state financing, secret messages, political subversion, various clan rivalries, and much that was coded and laden with murky plans. Some of it was clearly created conspiratorially. This came as a big surprise to me. I was a big sci-fi buff and I prided myself on being well-read in this genre. With the exception of the embarrassing Stanislaw Lem oversight, I thought I was pretty much au courant with the whole corpus of work. Philip K. Dick was my favorite sci-fi writer. I had high regard for him. I took his claims seriously and at face value. As for Lem, I hadn't really heard of him so I tended to wonder where he came from and whether he could have put out such an impressive oeuvre on his own. The numerous copies of his work in German which I found in Dulcinea's collection brought to my attention the full scale of his imaginative project. I took Dick's charges with the utmost seriousness. I was skeptical but open to the possibility that he was a front. Dulcinea would have nothing to do with it, however. She said it was ridiculous and that Dick was the one that needed to be investigated. And then she asked me a disturbing question. She said all of the American science fiction writers were “sie sind Nazis und antisemiten, right?” The word "right" told me that she was both asking a question and looking at me to agree with her. How could she come to this conclusion, I wondered.
I was taken a bit aback by Dulcinea's statement. I wanted to respond very carefully and gently. I understood her perspective and how deeply she held some views. Views, incidentally, that were not radically different from some of the views at the TMA, Campbell’s, not in the least. The Nazis were with us and the ‘great war’ was still upon us. I grasped that. I started to say that science fiction was a genre of literature that was built around certain tropes and motifs and general themes, trying to sound smart but not condescending and with all my efforts directed at showing off my knowledge. “It all begins with H. G. Wells, the 1898 The War of the Worlds. That is really the first book, it's a kind of landmark in the creation of what we call science fiction,” I said. “But what happens in The War of the Worlds?" she asked with a clear sense and knowledge of the book. Her quick reply kind of surprised me. As I recall, I said, “Well, it's an invasion by a superior civilization.” “And…well, what happens?” she repeated.
I wasn't sure what she was getting at. But she replied before I had an opportunity to respond. “They decimate humanity, they destroy the world like Nazis, don't they? The invaders are Nazis. Are they not?” I said that this was just the nature of the genre, it makes for a good narrative, like Cowboy and Western flicks. It's a narrative and it drives interest and excitement. “But it has patterned all of American science fiction. This is not the case with other sci-fi literature,” she pointed out. She then went to say, well, take a look Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, it was published shortly after The War of the Worlds, but it pictures a thriving, utopian world, and aliens that are not only more advanced but more compassionate that are interested in lifting up our world and solving our problems not destroying and killing and genocide. I was disconcerted by how quickly she was taking control of the conversation, effortlessly referencing various books and writers. My confidence was quickly taking a dive, but I said “yes, you're correct, but I don't see real Nazis and anti-semites in American science fiction, it is entirely free of that poison.” I thought throwing in the word poison would position me sweetly with her. I was waving around her father's precious wrist watch. Why should I challenge her at any point?
And then to up the intellectual heat, she suggested that I look at Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream and Philip K Dick's, The Man in the High Castle as deep wish fulfillments. They call them alternate history but they are not alternate histories; these are deep-seated dreams that the Western unconscious is saturated with, core archetypes floating up to the surface. We all know that the Nazis are everywhere, she said as if it were common knowledge, but those writers, shreybers, she called them, want to reanimate Hitler. And the entire sci-fi establishment continues to lionize these authors and laud these pieces of propaganda. These are revolutionary tracts for fascist and Nazi sympathizers, she insisted. I listened attentively. I had read The Man in the High Castle but I was unfamiliar with The Iron Dream and I asked her to explain it to me.
It was similar to Dick's book, she said, with a nested novel within the novel but in this future the Soviets won the First World War and Hitler had immigrated to America in 1919 where he became a cult science fiction writer. The Soviet Union had conquered Europe, the Holocaust still occurred, but had been committed by the Soviet Union, which was a frightening thought to contemplate as an alternate vision of the future. I began to feel as she conveyed the story to me, the fear that all of this conjures up and that maybe, just maybe, science fiction as a genre was not as innocent as it might seem and that perhaps these narratives in the long history of human culture might indeed be regarded in retrospect as subversive. I decided to listen and think. The vision that she described still haunts me, it has affected my thinking at the TMA on many levels over the following years. Several hours passed as our conversation traversed various subjects, and the restaurant had begun to close. Wong was carefully writing up an indecipherable bill, which I paid without any scrutiny. Younger Wong's weird tics and mannerisms gave me a strange feeling but I thought that would be the end of my dealing with him. How wrong I was.
We left the restaurant in great spirits. The night temperature was perfect, I felt the wonderful extra weight of the wristwatch on my left hand. It gave me a special feeling, as if a special baton had been passed to me, that her father's energy and passion and faith had been transferred to me. It was just not the timepiece and its intricacy but the act of the gift that animated me. My relationship with Dulcinea had also shifted in some imperceptible fashion, something had changed. A part of her father was now part of me. Was it the kind of emotional relationship that I wanted to encourage? I concluded that any kind of relationship on any basis was good. As we walked Dulcinea held my arm and walked closer to me. That felt special. As we got to 7th Avenue and Bleeker street, a very young Gypsy boy, about six or seven, ran up to Dulcinea and gave her a beautiful long stem rose and said, “come with me.” He led us half a block around a bend, and it was then we came to a window that said in bright red neon, “Palmistry, Crystal Gazer, Soothsayers, Futures Told, All Welcome.”
The little boy then tugged at my hand and said, “Please come. Come. You must come.” At which point, a dark-haired Gypsy appeared at the door, saying nothing but waving her hand. I turned to Dulcinea and said, “let's go, it will be fun,” figuring that the Gypsy will predict our future relationship, marriage and happiness together. But Dulcinea's face turned immediately serious, watchful and alert. She carefully scrutinized everything, her eyes turning over every square inch, the basements, the rooflines, turning to see if anyone else is sighting her or me. She was not pleased by this invitation, I could see. I continued to persist and to pull her while the young boy with surprising strength was pulling me. We had both eaten quite a bit and maybe this lessened our inhibitions. There was nothing to fear. “Let's go in,” I suggested. Dulcinea continued to say nothing as we entered.
There were tacky red velvet and gold lined chairs, heavy red drapes, beads separating the main seance room from the rest of the quarters. The air was scented with some kind of narcotic incense that was very heavy and redolent of some quality that I could not exactly place, a strange kind of perfume, that seemed to relax my anxiety and powers of resistance. The Gypsy fortune teller was in a sheer white off shoulder blouse, displaying her ample bosom as is characteristic of some Gypsy's odd immodesty in this regard, over which she had a blue velvet bodice that looked like lingerie, a beautiful gold and silver embroidered skirt, with a ruffled underskirt, a wide sequined waist sash and a bandana on her head worn as is often seen with these women. She was covered in gold jewelry, huge hoop earrings and bracelets all up her arms and around her ankles. She was quite young, maybe less than thirty and her skin was a dark olive color.
She spoke very softly and gently and graciously and made us some tea very carefully, going to a lot of care and mixing in different leaves. She asked questions as we slowly sipped the tea. I spoke but Dulcinea remained perfectly silent, aware and alert. The fortune teller noticed her posture and manner and I could see that she was thinking about how to approach her and was delaying her customary routine. Again, I was merely hoping for her to say that we were made for each other, that we would be happy together, that our lifelines looked good and to drop twenty bucks. It was an experience that I thought would be over and done with before it even got started. My expectations were to be disappointed, however. I noticed that the tea was changing my perception of things, I began to feel a strange sense of euphoria, and a feeling of heightened awareness. The fortune teller began to chant in some strange language over her large crystal ball, while waving her hands over it. After five minutes of this chanting, some really strange things began to happen, the crystal ball seemed to double in size and to almost levitate over the floor. As the chanting continued there came a disembodied voice said that something terrible was being born, something monstrous, that it had waited eons for its time, a half-beast, half-demon, an evil creature, whose time had come around, that it was dragging its body across some fire-strewn desert, starving, ferocious, hungry. She then said that I would play a great role in defeating this creature and that I must perform certain specific tasks in a certain specific order, and that I must depart from the ordinary world, and that I will receive a very special call, which will be hard to recognize, but whatever I do, I must absolutely reply to it; and further, that I would receive the help of a mentor who I must trust, and that when the times comes, that I would be asked to cross a guarded threshold, and that crossing this threshold would lead me to a supernatural world where I will be given another set of instructions.
All of this caused Dulcinea to shudder. As unbelievable as it may sound, I suddenly saw the entire Milky Way Galaxy revolve within the crystal and I felt myself being pulled into a time vortex, traveling through vast stretches of space; with huge structures appearing around me, dazzling colors being pulled apart, and then suddenly it vanished and I was back in the crystal reader’s parlor. The oracle then began to chant to Dulcinea although she did not make any predictions about her but rather locked her in her gaze and stared intently at her rubbing her hands over her earrings, and over her hands. Dulcinea had tens of thousands of dollars of diamonds on her, which I am sure the Gypsy, was well aware of. At this point, she said that Dulcinea was being haunted by a negative presence, and that someone had violated and harmed her heart chakra. She said that she needed a spiritual cleansing and that her jewels possessed ‘wu’ and must be cleansed so that she should put them into a plastic bag. Dulcinea, who I immediately thought would see what the woman was up to, did the very opposite; she began to remove her jewelry.
I was utterly shocked and in my first act of assertiveness jumped up and said no, which alarmed Dulcinea. No, I said. The gypsy, realizing she had overplayed her hand, said that I spoiled her energies and that we would have to suffer the consequences. I asked her how much I owed her and she said twenty-five dollars. Twenty dollars as advertised and five dollars for the tea. We walked back in silence to the apartment with a little banter about what the fortune teller’s prophecy meant for me. The session did not go as I anticipated and I apologized. Dulcinea said something which I will never forget. She said that we should have given the mystic all of the diamonds, even if she were to keep them. She would now curse us and we would never be free of her. The fortune teller’s prophecy was not something I should dismiss, she exhorted. I asked her if she saw the galaxies and the imagery in the crystal ball that was floating in the room and she said no, that she didn't see anything. How could that be possible, I asked myself. A week later, Dulcinea and I were walking in the same area around 7th and Bleeker Street. I looked for the fortune teller's house but it was not there. I asked a neighbor nearby where she went and he said that there was no such place on this stretch of the street. Another mystery added to the original mystery. What had really happened that night?