Spooked by something, a pair of gulls takes off from the crown of a derrick a block south, yelping and beating their wings, and Stanley and Welles both jump. The dog freezes, raises its head. We should move on, Welles says. The place I want to show you isn’t much farther.
They cross the boulevard’s eastbound lanes and pass once more into a street of battered bungalows. Derricks rise from empty lots, sometimes from lawns. The houses are dark, tumbledown, with broken windows. An abandoned Kaiser-Frazer sits on the left side of the street, perched haphazardly across the curb; it’s ringed by shards of glass and crushed cigarette butts, and three of its tires are slashed. Stanley’s shoreline rivals have left their marks here, painting crude snarling canines on the car’s doors and hood. Dashed-off letters twist in the spaces between, advertising the illiteracy of their authors: D O G E S. Stanley smirks to himself.
We spoke earlier of wars, Welles says, and of great battlefields. I believe that battles can take a number of forms. One could even say that we are walking through a battlefield right now. Often it has occurred to me that what is being fought over in these conflicts — be they great or subtle — is the right to memory. And not only the right to remember, but the right to forget. To selectively forget.
They’ve come to a steep bridge over a canal. Looking down, Stanley sees the reflection of the fog-shrouded moon in the stagnant water, filtered through an iridescent glaze of oil. About fifty yards to the right, this canal joins a wider waterway that parallels the street they walk on. A block ahead is a second bridge, then a third beyond that one, and Stanley becomes aware of a network of brackish canals that runs throughout the neighborhood, scum-filmed and overgrown, a liquid shadow cast by the grid of streets. Welles and the dog walk alongside the bridge railing; Stanley follows them. As their footsteps echo below he hears the scurry of rodents, the percolating cluck of mallards roused from sleep.
The name of this place, Welles says, is not an affectation. Or not an unearned affectation, at any rate. Nearly every street that you and I walked upon this evening, and more besides, were at one time canals. The roundabout on Windward was once a lagoon. Rialto Street, Grand Boulevard, the St. Mark’s Hoteclass="underline" these names were originally descriptive, not merely allusive. But the city of Los Angeles filled in most of the canals in 1929—to make the area more easily accessible by automobile, I believe — and the original character of the place has been all but lost since that time. I was quite conscious of that history while I was writing my book.
Welles takes the pipe from his teeth and thumps it against his palm, emptying the ash into the canal. His tobacco tin reappears. The intellectual tradition in which Crivano participated, he says, was syncretic, millenarian, utopian. Like all utopian traditions — think here of Plato, Augustine, More, Campanella — its metaphors are inevitably urban. We find this throughout the Hermetic literature. In the Asclepius, for instance, we see prophesized a city founded toward the setting sun into which it is said the whole race of mortal men shall hasten by land and sea when the gods of Egypt return. In the Picatrix, we read of Hermes Trismegistus’s city of Adocentyn, wherein the display of magical images — images, mind you! — assures the virtue and the prosperity of every inhabitant. The architecture of the city’s structures reflects the architecture of the heavens. Think of the implications of this. In the perfect city, we become our perfect selves. It is literally heaven on earth.
The moon’s reflection on the canal’s surface is split by a swimming rat; the smooth V of its wake expands toward the banks with geometrical precision. Welles packs his pipe as he waits for it to cross. When he’s finished, he lights up, then lets the burning match drop to the water. A circle of blue-green flame forms where it falls, flares for a moment, and dies out.
We think of cities as places, Welles says. They are not. Mountains are places. Deserts are places. We are, in fact, standing in a desert right now. Cities are ideas. Independent of geography. They can vanish, suddenly or gradually, and reappear thousands of miles away. Changed, perhaps. Reduced. Always imperfectly realized. But still somehow the same. Retaining the essence of the idea. As above, so below, as the alchemists would say. To perfect the wonders of the One. This, for me, is the heart — the real kernel — of Crivano’s story. It’s what I had in mind when I wrote it, anyway. And it’s why I wanted to show you this place. We should go back now.
They return to the boulevard the way they came, then make a left to pick up the boardwalk again. Stanley replays what Welles has been saying in his mind, looking for threads that might connect to the questions he wants answered. He’s glad the guy’s on a roll, but it’s making him nervous, too. It almost seems like Welles is talking about a different book than the one he read. What was it you said a minute ago? Stanley says. About my patron? What was it you meant by that?
Hm? Oh. Yes. Hermes Trismegistus. Do you know who he is?
I know who he is in your book. He’s some kind of god, or a wizard, who lived a long time ago.
He was understood by Renaissance intellectuals to be the Egyptian equivalent of Moses. He was identified with Thoth — the giver of laws, the inventor of writing — and also with the Greek Hermes, the messenger of the gods, the god of healing, of magic, and of secrets. He was an intermediary between worlds, a crosser of barriers, and as such he was regarded as the patron of thieves, scholars, alchemists, and, of course, of gamblers like yourself. That is what I meant.
So you didn’t just make him up?
No! Welles says. Good lord, no. It took hundreds of people, misunderstanding one another for thousands of years, to invent the Thrice-Great Hermes. Starving poets huddled in their garrets. Drunken bards prancing around bonfires. Weary mothers luring their wee babes toward sleep. I just added my own small confusion to the end of the long and crooked column.
They’re still blocks south of the arcades. The broad lots are dotted with large beachfront houses, once grand, now wind-scoured, listing on their foundations. The few that show any evidence of care only seem more decrepit for it: fresh paint coats a collapsed veranda, plaster cherubim caper on a denuded lawn, neat rows of marigolds line a path of shattered cobblestone. There’s a ruined boat in the yard of the next house — long and black, a toothed iron prow, half-buried in sand — that’s been turned into a flowerbox: its split hull runs over with periwinkle, coreopsis, rose mallow, the petals turned pale sepia by the streetlamps’ glow.
Stanley is silent, absently counting the wide planks beneath his feet, conscious of the sandy gaps. He thinks about tightrope walkers, about how they’re not supposed to look down, not supposed to think about the precariousness of what supports them. He wonders if it was a smart idea to come out here after all. What about Crivano? he says.
Crivano?
You made Crivano up. Right?
Welles sighs, looks out at the ocean. With Crivano, he says, I took a number of liberties. In the historical record he is barely a shade. I filled in the gaps as imaginatively as possible. Of course, it is precisely those lacunae that made it possible for me to write the book at all.
Stanley stops walking. Welles and the dog carry on for a couple of paces, then turn and circle to face him.
You’re telling me Crivano was a real person, Stanley says.
He was a historical person, yes. I discovered a brief and rather cryptic mention of him in the letters of Suor Giustina Glissenti while I was researching an entirely unrelated matter, and I was enchanted by the metaphorical possibilities he suggested.