from Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head

PHILIP WHALEN

Roy made himself drunk. He drank sake out of expensive Japanese folk pottery, ate octopus arms, chicken giblets, and shrimp teriyaki. While he ate and drank, he read a new little magazine from New York. All those young people who might have been his own children had sent him their poems and plays, news from home. He was very drunk and very happy.

He aimed the small powerful reading lamp into the garden, the stone wash-basin under shrub leaves—where was he?—would he step out onto (the fallen twiglets and needles of hemlock and fir trees mixed with moss and vine maple leaves and old fern fronds) Mt. Baker National Forest? Into a Japanese village, a northern suburb of the Capital, Heian Kyo, founded eleven hundred years ago by the Divine Emperor Kammu, for coffee (known to the West for two hundred years) under three kinds of light fixtures, Bessa Me Mucho by Muzak and blue gauze curtains blocking the neon trolley cars. “Why don’t all the people employed by this outfit run stark raving gaga after a half hour on duty in this place? Which might as well be Canoga Park or Brentwood or Sherman Oaks, all desperately new and modern and nowhere fake crystal chandeliers and real chrysanthemums, true rubber trees, bromeliads and cycads of the Lower Carboniferous and a few doilies of machine-made lace all standing over what had been a handmade landscape garden of the earlier Muromachi period . . . as long as you are inside the building . . . outside are frogs in the rice paddies, the honey buckets’ wild perfume. What a rhapsody of times and styles,” Roy thought. “Not even Perez Prado, but a nameless rhumba band. And light from a Coleman lantern, wide band across the mountain top illuminates the eyes of a six-point buck, his forefoot on the second step of the stairs nosily searching for salt, for Perez, Mene and Tekel, for Paris mossy lichen granite under hoof, ten minutes after eight p.m. on Wednesday night—to the very day!”

Roy had finished his coffee; his head throbbed and sang. “Eleven years ago to the very day. It took three hours for the sun to go down; it quit, finally, twenty minutes ago, the glass in the windows on four sides of me totally black, the green paint of the woodwork gone gray, colorless under Coleman light anchored to rock top of mountain under thin boards under my feet under my sleeping ear tonight, floating on white rope net the lightnings of Heaven and Earth and Zodiacal Time: as I remember the place where I sit now was once the parking lot for Mount Hiei Taxi Company but if I walk a block and a half to more coffee in a place which also remembers the now nonexistent parking lot, these blue plastic lights and gauze will (o-shibori! Boiled hot hand towel served up in limp plastic condom pops MERRY CHRISTMAS wet sprinkle fireworks) DISAPPEAR. Forever. Do I have any money in my pockets. Can I pay the bill.”

Roy was still two-thirds drunk and uncomfortable; he wanted out of that condition. He would have more coffee. He staggered along beside the wide, nearly deserted street, to another coffee-ya, a small television joint where six Japanese drivers were watching American soldiers “winning” what the local newspapers (Roy sourly noted) refer to nowadays as a remotely historical “Pacific War.”

“At least one of these guys is old enough to have been there,” Roy thought. “And so am I. The rest look too young to have known more about it than kids fifteen or sixteen years old may have heard on the Imperial Radio. The curious thing about these men is that they seem to believe what it is they’re seeing right now as being immediately present, this reconstruction of what was happening twenty years ago. Now here we all are, drinking the same expensive coffee which gives us all the same expensive cardiac heebie-jeebies. Only the lady behind the counter doesn’t care to look, she’s busy making coffee. One boy turns the pages of a magazine while he watches. Sweet potato steam whistle cart passes by, beyond the black window and its machine lace curtain; station break tooth paste ads, and then the war continues. We’ve learned nothing. Sweet potato whistle. The only reality is mud swamp New Guinea death? Tarawa Kwajalein, the boy with the magazine raptly picks his nose. I wonder where they all are. I watch their watching faces, what connection has any of this fraudulent movie with any real experience, any life or hope or recollection: echoing gunfire, machine gun rattle and rifle ricochet—the film editor cuts back and forth from face to gun barrel to running squirming figures among vines, bamboos. The connection is the language. In this movie, both sides are speaking Japanese. I understand the American faces and gestures, but the voices are incomprehensible. The background music clues me in; we are winning: Whitey triumphs again (but he’s talking Japanese).”

Roy felt too embarrassed to stay any longer. He went to another larger place further up the street where was the folk guitar Joan Baez Revolt of the intellectual young; the clientele was all university people drinking coffee and tea and discussing Hegel and Marx. They liked Joan Baez because her guitar sounded to them rather Japanese and like a koto; they hadn’t any idea what she was singing, except that Time magazine said she was great and new and modern. Roy talked with some of the students in halting English and Japanese. They claimed that they were majoring in economics. It turned out that they knew nothing about the subject, but they were all communists. They knew nothing about communist theory, either, but they all agreed that it was European and progressive and that all the world, particularly China, was making great progress under the communist system.

This coffee shop also served everything out of folk pottery. There was a beamed ceiling and a fireplace and furniture of a kind which the maker imagined must inhabit Swiss chalets. There were lace curtains, an expensive stereophonic phonograph, potted rubber trees, cycads, a Cryptomeria tree masquerading as a Christmas tree with blinking lights, and Easter lilies blooming in a big jar. Small vases of chrysanthemums stood on each table. The Joan Baez Revolution disappeared, to be replaced by Miles Davis & Co. The stereo loudspeakers trademarked Chrysler vibrated and throbbed and chimed Bags Groove. (Major Hoople remembering the Crimean War—“kaff, kaff! Egad!”)

Roy woke up in the middle of the night. What did he want. Why was he afraid of the Great Mahatma. Why should he feel that he was in a false position vis-à-vis that Figure. He was hungover, his head hurt a little bit, his ears felt full of water, but actually his head was full of light and the light had awakened him.

Roy went to the bathroom. He took two aspirin tablets. He saw from the study windows that there had been a fall of snow while he’d been asleep.

“All that the Grand Mahatma requires—or anybody else wants—is my sincerity?” Roy asked himself. “Where’s that at. I move from my own center which is a seated figure that doesn’t move, needs not—but this is clap-trap. Cold water with aspirin is more exactly what I ‘did.’”

He wondered why he should feel afraid of the hour, then decided that he wasn’t really afraid. He turned on the lights and sat down to accept the fact that he was awake in the middle of the night and that there was nothing wrong with being awake any time. He would keep the appointment that he had later that morning. He wouldn’t oversleep, he wouldn’t be late. The alarm clock was working just fine. He felt that it was quite important that he no longer felt unhappy or afraid. It wasn’t a fit of insomnia, it wasn’t a nightmare, it wasn’t a “Dark Night of the Soul,” he was just awake. The house was very cold; he might turn on the heat.

Later in the morning he was surprised to find no trace of snow or frost on the ground outside. He had made a mistake, seeing moonlight on the stones and moss.

[1985]