DAVID LEO RICE / JAKOB AS NAZI HUNTER
I: Jakob as Nazi Hunter (1960s-70s)
The green hills of New Hampshire. The snow-capped peaks of Vermont. The rocky coasts of Maine, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Jakob makes his way around and around this landscape throughout the 1960s trailing an ever-growing chain of white-bearded heads behind him. He ties the beard of one to the hair of the next, up and down from Portsmouth to Keene and in from Gloucester to Westerly, stopping at half-shuttered English taverns to water the heads when they dry out. He drags the chain in through softened corkboard doors and orders ten or fifteen or, eventually, thirty-five pints of ale and lines them up like dog bowls along the frosty or sweaty floorboards and pulls the heads’ tongues from their throats and bids them gruffly to drink.
As the tongues lap, forced into silence by the froth on their pint glasses, the locals who seemed to have deserted these taverns a generation ago seep in through the open doorway to watch, holding bitters and Bass Ales of their own as the heads drain their portions and Jakob stands beside them expecting applause. He beams when that applause arrives, nodding and bowing like they’re all too kind, much too kind, eyeing the Nazi eyes on the ground to see if they realize who the man that put them in this state really is.
When the beer has run through their necks and onto the wood and down into the basement to drain back into the kegs from which it will be pulled again when the time is right, and when the heads have then tipped sideways in the spillover and returned to their conversation in the skull-language they’ve acquired over the course of their long journey through New England, Jakob gathers the beard of the first head in the chain, the oldest, nicknamed, of course, Adolf, though the name on his mailbox in Putney read Clive Welliver, and he drags them out, through the ice and ocean mist over New London and then he’s gone, out of the lives of the locals, who themselves have been gone from New London and all its analogues for a full generation. They return to latency, hovering half-seen in the mist that lowers over the town like plastic wrap over a plate of cold meat.
~
And what of that generation, and all those before it? All of history before the Holocaust that burned an impermeable wall of scar tissue between the old days and these—not yet new days, perhaps, but days stretching far beyond the continuum of the Old? Jakob drags his chain along the Connecticut coast, through bogs and inlets and oxbows off the Sound, semi-cognizant of standing at the very forefront of the long line that produced him.
On days like this, his ancestors cluster in from the shallow reaches of the sea and out from the inner sanctums of the coastal villages, Stonington and Old Saybrook and Old Lyme, appearing in gaggles of knotted beards tied with gilded thread, dressed in cloth vestments and hand-sewn house dresses embroidered with lilies and asters, as lost and yet as native to this coastline as any race that ever inhabited it. Heads with features blurred beyond distinction, nattering in Yiddish while they watch Jakob and his chain pass by, registering everything without letting anything slip. Sludge gray air, fish-lips, generations gone to ruin, sustaining themselves on congress with the sea-people long enough to belch Jakob up from oblivion and onto dry land, to birth their redeemer however swimmy his genes. The heads growl as they bounce along the wet gravel, chattering their broken teeth together, vowing revenge on these remnants of the Connecticut and the Rhode Island and the Cape Cod coastal communities, even now, reduced nearly to nothing, impotent save for the hold they have over Jakob, the way in which, much as they are tangled in his grip, their hair and beards tangled together in his fist, he too remains tangled in theirs, bound to a destiny foisted upon him by generations remote in time yet still all too near in space, watching him from shadows and whispering, “Make good, make good, redeem us, if not in our own lives then in the great and abiding Book of History, which now lies open before you alone.”
As the journey continues and the circuit narrows, the routine grows tiresome. Raiding the homes of old men in the hidden thickets outside towns along the Quabbin and nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, tying the older heads to a fencepost—a post that, though Jakob tries not to wonder why, is always waiting there to mark the home of his next target—and then running in to behead an old man whose surprise seems feigned, his expression as rote as those on the faces of the skulls, and then tying that head to the back of the chain and dragging it bleeding and complaining back onto the road, stopping for a round at the tavern if the town has one...
Yet Jakob has no vision of what comes next.
He assumes he will not wear down completely until a breakthrough occurs or his replacement, if he has one, arrives, but the weariness of dragging the chain, which gets heavier and more unwieldy with each new conquest, builds in him to the point where he can’t see how much farther he can drag it. Outwardly manifesting his inner weariness, the space he operates in, the entire green and gray expanse of New England, comes to feel ever more hemmed in, oppressed by its own over-familiarity, a body filling with more and more of itself until it has no room to function. Until Jakob with all the many heads behind him is frozen in place like a shepherd in a fresco.
~
The 60s blur into the 70s and, at a loss for how else to proceed, Jakob leans in to the fame that’s been growing all this time, accepting his role as a major figure in the Art World, though he knows this account of his adventure is at best a paltry cover for the truth behind it, the power that all his ancestors, going back to Egypt, have vested him with, the redemption he has either already achieved or else, he fears, reached the point at which everyone can see that he never will.
Some towns already boast museums of his exploits with bookstores that carry the Biography, in which he reads that he first made waves by setting out to kill the last of the Nazis hidden throughout New England in the early 60s, and then made further waves when, in the late 60s, it was alleged that he was wrong—deliberately so, according to several key voices—in his choice of targets, and had in fact murdered innocent old men, taking their lives to prove a point that no one could comprehend and that he pointedly refused to clarify and then—he flips to the next chapter in a used book warehouse in Hadley, MA, on an early spring night redolent of pollen and cow dung—his fame reached a level none had expected when it was claimed that the entirety of the Holocaust in New England had been his idea, that he had become, indeed, a kind of Demiurge, a Mage of History rewriting events with such abandon and at such scale that ordinary humans could do nothing but bow down, worshipping him as a deity or cursing him as a devil, or, more often, both at once. And no one in New England—he closes the Biography after reading that, “There may never be another Revelation, but the power of Recombination has barely been explored”—dared to speculate on what form the power he had somehow vested himself with would take when it either burned out from within or encountered an even greater power from without.
He tours the Museum of Jakob’s Exploits inside the town hall in Hadley, dragging his chain along the first floor, which details the years when he was seen as a genuine Nazi hunter, and then the second floor, which details the years when he was seen as a fraud and a madman and maybe a new kind of genius, and then, at last, he comes to rest on the third floor, a stuffy, barely finished attic where the only heads are the ones he drags in, as if he’s arrived here to take his place as the missing exhibit and travel no further.
Bedding down on rough pine boards among the heads and the boxed-up materials from the town hall, he considers this possibility in earnest for the first time. He lies there all night and through the glorious Hadley sunrise, dozing while a few early visitors duck in and out, and he imagines what his life would, in retrospect, have amounted to if it ended here. He pictures the Biography with its thick back half full of unprinted pages, flaking out of the binding and falling to the ground in the hundreds of gift shops and bookstores that carry it, until the story of his life was only that of an eccentric artist, and perhaps a mass murderer, active in the 1960s and 70s and then no more. His body hardening into a rural exhibit of his own late work, a fitting end for a career that had drifted into purgatory somewhere near its middle. He chews this sentence over, again and again, until, despite the day’s growing heat, he slips into a dream.
~
In the dream, he’s back in the woods behind New London, covered in sea air and resting on slick moss. He snuggles down into this moss and listens to the heads natter about werewolves and Valkyries and sandmen and bears with mile-long claws uprooting entire families from the villages along the coast where they’ve cowered for generations, praying for a Messiah to deliver them. In the heads’ narrative, a pristine and unchallenged Black Forest runs clear from one edge of New England to the other, blanketing the New Country in the noble foliage of the Old.
As he listens to these voices in the dream, Jakob sees himself in terms of generations, the grandeur of his being overflowing every frame he tries to house it in, always necessitating a further branch on the family tree. “I just want to live my own life,” he pleads with his mother, who embraces him and replies, “If only you could. If only you could.”
But he doesn’t need her to tell him that he can’t. That he would never have become the hero of this narrative if that were his destiny. If it were his destiny to lie on the floor of a converted farmhouse in Hadley, there would be no written account of his having done so, just as there isn’t for the overwhelming majority of those who’ve come and gone from the territories his life has played out in so far. “No,” his mother seems to say, translucent in the haze of another dawn, “no, you’ve known from the start that your journey doesn’t end here. Go to New Haven. They’re awaiting your arrival.”
~
The dream ends as the sun rises again and Jakob knows the decision has been made. He drags his heads down from that third floor, leaving the exhibit empty, passes the second and first floor accounts of his career, complete now with a handwritten sign that reads “Special Exhibit: Jakob’s Dream, Fl. 3,” and sets out again for the Long Island Sound.
A week later, slogging toward New Haven, he passes the boiling radiation pits along the coast. He stops before the rows of smokestacks, dozens in the shallow water, belching up into the spring sky. The heads perk up, aware that their destination is near. The final vision before Jakob’s arrival at Yale. The reactors smelt the Holocaust, boiling it down, a natural resource decoupled from land and matter and names and causes and effects, boiling the world into the form that Jakob will soon turn out to have lived in all along. The world that only the Biography, if anyone could ever read it to the end, can put in order.
He takes in the full scope of the pits, which might also be called the refinery towers, or the smelting poles, the reactors at the heart of the whole enterprise, working without pause, and he stamps down the heads as they yip and bite for their turn to fly in, up through the vapor and down into the smokestacks, to melt and spread through the heart of the reactor and there be born again. He smells the reactors boiling history into tar, fusing the continents, doubling and tripling the weight of what New England can bear, lathering surplus matter upon the ground of his life until the Old Country clings to the New like a slab of rancid cheese atop a slice of toasted rye.
Jakob sits on a bench in a row apparently designated as a viewing area, and watches as a dozen tankers pull in from out at sea. They draw near to the pits, then dock beside them, latching onto their cement hulks with vicious quivering pincers. When the pincers have penetrated deep into the sides of the reactors, workers in full-body suits—Jakob can’t tell at what distance he’s viewing this from: the spectacle seems at once to be occurring out at sea and right before his eyes—emerge from their ships hefting tremendous hoses that spurt Holocaust from steaming nozzles. The workers turn and seem to grin in Jakob’s direction, though their expressions remain obscured behind their masks. They grin and even, Jakob considers, fingering the hair of the heads he’s gathered in his lap, seek some form of validation from him. He nods. “Proceed,” he whispers.
And proceed they do. Tanker after tanker pulls in from the horizon, bearing a sloppy gut full of Holocaust waiting its turn to be decanted through the hoses and into the reactors, which whir and light up red as their depleted stores replenish. The New London air turns misty and thick, mottled with flecks and cinders, as the pits churn and gurgle, filling all the space between Jakob and heaven with molten Holocaust, packing it so hard into the derelict New London streets that the old town shudders, cracks, and, once again, replicates, smearing a mutated version of itself atop the old, adding yet another layer between where Jakob sits and any original New England he might still claim to have emerged from.
~
When the process is complete, he nods again to the workers who appear to wait in thrall for his blessing, then pulls himself up from the bench, straightens the heads in his lap, untangles their beards, and sets off dragging them into town to see if, after all this, a halfway open bar serving fried fish and Bass Ale still remains.
Having found one, he takes a seat, orders a round for all the heads that can fit inside—many others remain stabled out back, by the dumpsters and reserve cooking oil—and, ready to hear the story he’s avoided all this time, he nods to the bartender. Pretending not to respond on cue, the hefty bald man waits a moment before saying, apparently to a few old-timers in a peanut-strewn corner, “Reminds me of the story of the boy who climbed the mountain to kill that old man who claimed, God knows why, to be that very same boy. Claimed it even as the boy sawed his head clean off with an ax—this must’ve been, oh, somewhere outside Brattleboro, out by the river, or up in the Green or White Mountains, who can say?—and the strangest thing is, once the boy had killed the old man, who he claimed was waiting to be killed, waiting and begging for it alone in that cabin of his, as if being killed by his own self in this way could redeem his People, birthing a Messiah even, is how he put it… after he did it and buried the man in the yard in front of the cabin, he really did become that man. Don’t ask me how,” he turns to Jakob as if to ask permission to conclude, “but that’s what happened. Some say the old man that boy became, if you want to put it that way, though he’d be well over a hundred now, is still roaming the backroads of New England as we speak, Messiah or not. Waiting for his own chopper to come. Gives you the spooks to think of it.”
Then he looks away, pulls a fresh Bass Ale from the tap, slugs it down, shudders, and says, “Don’t know what got into me. Everybody out. I need to be alone in here tonight.” He pulls another Bass while Jakob gathers his heads and drags them away, along with the regulars whose only role here, he knows, is to have appeared to absorb the story, so as not to leave Jakob and the bartender to bear it alone.
~
Jakob takes a room in an economy motel on the western edge of New London, ignoring the radiation workers who clearly also frequent the place, half of them still in their suits with their masks pulled up just enough to show their fishy faces.
In the morning, he rises early and walks to the town’s main attraction, a variant of what every New England town now has to offer: a row of filthy glass cubes inside which the salient persons of Jakob’s youth sputter and struggle for air. He strides among the exhibits, alone save for several visitors who keep enough distance to remain safely attached to the background, present only as tone. He examines each scenario, torn between assuming the role of a cruel inspector and that of a bereaved orphan, sundered from the last of what made him whole upon the earth.
In one cube, the family visits Watch Hill, their habitual Rhode Island summer excursion, romping over the dunes and up to the edge of the sea, while, in another, they wait in line outside a maple sugar house on the first warm weekend in March, the air full of snowmelt and sugar steam. In yet another, Jakob and his mother and father press their tokens into the slots in the turnstiles at the harvest festival on the first cool weekend of October and join the crowds for fried dough and candy apples and rides on the giant Ferris wheel, high enough to see the darkness surrounding the town on every side, and even the cabin at the top of the highest mountain to the west, lit only by a cluster of stars overhead.
He knows he can wait as long as he wants to pull the lever that sends in the gas, but he knows also that he’ll pull it soon enough. Once he has, he roams from cube to cube to watch the families suffer, their lips splayed against the glass, smudging it as they slide into a pit that—Jakob looks down, following the last descent of his mother and father and their mothers and fathers, and on and on—is already full of bodies, dozens and hundreds thick in an open-mouthed pile.
He knows what happens when he watches too long, but he lets it happen anyway. He pushes his face closer to the glass, pressing his lips against it in imitation of his family doing the same on the other side, gasping as they gasp, until he’s no longer certain whether he’s here or there, standing on wet grass or wet skin. His feet tangle in the pile and he slips down, the warm salt spray of the sea at Watch Hill and the crisp maple steam on hot pancakes in March and the gleam of October apples and oak leaves and the sharp, brittle crack of a January afternoon all twining together into the head rush he came here to experience, until a voice says, “Leave now, you consigned us to this fate so that you might enjoy a hero’s welcome at Yale. Leave and go there now.”
~
Exhausted beyond the possibility of completing his journey on foot, Jakob settles into a comfortable Amtrak reclining seat, speeding past the NOW LEAVING BRIDGEPORT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL sign, on his way to New Haven with all the heads distributed throughout the otherwise empty compartment, each with a ticket of its own. “A purely personal Holocaust,” he scrawls in a Moleskine journal marked Lecture Notes while sipping a beer and chewing a hot dog from the café car. “I made myself into a sort of Hitler of pure nostalgia. That was my stroke of genius. To not only abandon the past but to murder it. And not only to murder it—to annihilate it so it could never return outside the glass enclosures I built, not to remind myself of that past but to remind myself of how mercilessly I’d put it to rest. So I could watch it die anytime I needed to sharpen my resolve. My conviction that I needed to live for myself and only myself, free of all the tentacles pulling me back to darkest Egypt.”
His eyes well with tears as he looks out the window at the jagged, perforated landscape, the wild chaos of a dozen New Londons and a dozen Bridgeports piled atop one another like cars in a junkyard, the sky shining through at crazy angles. “But where then did my quest for greatness play out?” He writes, careful to stabilize his hand against the train’s chugging. “The world I once felt myself to inhabit, in flesh and blood, with people I knew and even loved? Where is that world, I would like to ask? I did this to myself so that no one could do it to me and, because I was the one who did it, me and not you, I’m standing up here and you’re sitting down there and I’m going to tell you what it’s been like.”
He wipes his eyes and watches the landscape, empty tankers pushing out to sea, spindly willows rising from bogs. “I purged New England of the Old Country,” he writes, “after first importing it from across the ocean. I did both at once. I never lived in any single timeline. I couldn’t conceive of how to do that. First I brought it here, so that it could never exceed my reach, and then I boiled it down to resin and tar, spattering it across the length and breadth of the land I hailed from. I boiled my people down so it could all end with me. Massachusetts and Latvia and Poland and Connecticut all at once, sandwiched and then fried together. And out of that supreme wreckage, I alone became a god. I became the very Demiurge my father spent his life trying, as only a mortal can try, to appease. I did all this to crawl out on the longest limb, beyond the outer reaches of evolution. Beyond all the ancestry there’s ever been and can ever be. These heads I bring you here today stand as proof of that.”
Here he closes his notebook, finishes his lunch, and leans against the headrest, too spent to continue planning what he’ll say when he’s deployed onstage before an audience of thousands to say it.
II: Jakob at Yale (1981)
In the curator’s office at the dead center of the Yale Artistic Complex, Jakob sees that he has arrived beyond the reach of the human mind, his own included, having bottomed out and overcome all at once, having gotten everything he ever wished for and everything he ever feared.
As he listens to the curator and her assistants speak, outlining the terms of the University’s acquisition of all of his materials, including the heads he’s brought with him, his mind drifts back to the pits, trying to crowd inside before it’s too late. There are portals where his ancestry opens up, he can see suddenly, where the pits, bereft now of new material, feed it back into the landscape, seeding it there as a kind of potential, a chance to start over on the insane premise that even now, even after all this, actual history has still yet to begin. If the gamble he’s taken, whose terms he can no longer recall even as the curator explains them, yields no dividend, then he will slip through a hole and emerge on the other side as someone else.
He signs the contract the curator presents him with and nods when she asks if he’s ready to deliver his first lecture. “Very well,” she replies and gets up, waiting for Jakob to take hold of the heads and drag them behind her, out of the office and across the campus. Their weight feels different now that he’s signed their ownership away, but, still, he takes hold of them decisively and resolves to appear onstage as a man occupying the key position in his own life.
~
Before the first lecture is set to begin, the curator explains that Jakob will visit Professor Dalton’s infamous The Holocaust in Context(s) course, where he will preside as a guest of honor, apparently a century-old tradition observed by all Eliot Lecture honorees before their inaugural address.
Bursting into the lecture hall with the heads behind him, Jakob makes eye contact with Professor Dalton, with whom he’s corresponded sporadically over the years and who almost certainly spearheaded the process that has resulted in his invitation to participate in the world’s most prestigious lecture series. The students freeze between the shared gaze of these two luminaries, the world’s most renowned art critic regarding for the first time the object of his most penetrating criticism.
Professor Dalton blots a tear from his eye, flares his nostrils as if his whole face were bathed in steam, then steps back to the podium he’d been leaning on and says, “Wow. Just wow. I didn’t know if we’d ever meet. I wasn’t even sure if we should. You’re a hard man to summon, Jakob. I’ve written a dozen books about you and now… here you are.” He falls forward against the mic, leans there for a moment, then shifts his weight far enough back to right himself. “Sorry. Jakob, I fear it may demean us both to continue my lecture in your presence and yet, tradition being what it is, I am bound to do so. Let me apologize again in advance.”
He recovers enough to motion for Jakob to sit in the front row and to spread his heads across the front three, which have been roped off for this purpose. Once settled, Jakob allows the professor’s narrative to take him back to his own exploits, up and down the coasts of New England and in and out of its many forests. He listens to an account of how the Holocaust in Europe, better called the Original Holocaust, was broken into a million pieces and chiseled off the land it appeared to have originally occurred on and loaded into tankers waiting in the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam and shipped across the ocean to feed the burgeoning radiation industry in New London, bending against themselves the energies that had birthed and nearly terminated the twentieth century.
As the professor continues with his epic account of Jakob’s war against the Nazis of New England, beheading one and then another and then another, and then the counter-era that followed, in which one and then another and then another supposed Nazi was revealed to have been a docile old man, struck down by a maniac in the night as part of a visionary multi-decade art project, Jakob feels both protective of his story, and thus pained to hear it relayed as collegiate subject matter, and also relieved to be free of it, to hear it put to rest, neutered enough to serve as the subject of today’s lecture, a topic the students will, before they forget it entirely, be asked to discuss in their blue books on the final exam.
Perhaps none of this has to do with me, Jakob thinks, or only in the most perfunctory sense. Perhaps all of what’s happened is no more than an anecdote now, and my life, going forward, can be anything I choose.
~
At the conclusion of his remarks, Dalton holds his arms out with a practiced flourish and stands there until, a little off-cue, the curator drags the head-chain onstage and wraps the end around Dalton’s ankles and then sidles away while Dalton fondles one head after another, as if reconnecting with old friends, a little worse for wear but still holding up, all things considered. “And so you see,” he announces into a head whose left ear-hole he presses to his lips, causing his voice to whistle out the other side, “there is no stopping of the buck, only its endless slithering from town to town, the ultimate roadshow abroad in the great world, and isn’t that a lesson we might all take to heart?”
He surveys the lecture hall as it fills with luminaries, forcing the students to rise and offer their seats, hurrying to the back rows before those too are filled. “And now, it brings me no small measure of joy to introduce the man of the hour, the artist known only as Jakob, who has reified this roadshow as no one else has, and indeed as no one else would dare to try, who has made this roadshow visible to us in a way it never otherwise would have been, here to deliver the first of this year’s Eliot Lectures, following on the heels of last year’s honoree, J.L. Borges, as rare an opportunity as is given nowadays to hear a truly Great Man, great on the scale of historical or even ahistorical time, tell us whatever he deigns to.”
~
Jakob tumbles onstage, still covered in Amtrak hot dog crumbs, and feels a head crack under each foot as a wild surge of applause—the auditorium continues filling with faces, growing as if from the centers of the aisles out toward the doors—pushes him backward so forcefully he has to grab the mic and steady himself before beginning his story.
Lecture 1: On the Action Comics of My Youth
“When I was a boy,” he begins, in the silence that has suddenly replaced the chatter of the interim, “my mother took me to the stationer’s shop in the town I grew up in every time a new issue of Jakob as Nazi Hunter was released. She and I would eat Danishes and drink coffee—hers black and mine mostly milk—while we waited for the comics truck to arrive. Those were, I cannot possibly deny, the happiest moments of my life. Both the waiting for the comics and the reading of them, which we would do in the little park across from the stationer’s once we’d purchased the new issue and finished our modest yet still decadent breakfast.”
As he speaks, he can hear a slight delay or dissonance in his voice, as if it were being piped in from elsewhere and struggling to sync up with the motion of his mouth. He knows that soon the sync will be complete and the dissonance will disappear and then he will believe the story he’s telling. Therefore, he relishes the glitch for as long as it lasts, exploring its contours with his tongue, enjoying the knowledge that all of what he’s about to say is true and untrue within the quantum field that the pits have opened.
Then the sync is complete. “Those were the formative stories of my youth,” he continues, more assertively now. “Every day when I was five and six and seven was nothing but a waiting game, a dwindling surplus of hours, until I could crawl into my mother’s lap in bed and see where Jakob went next on his ceaseless quest to annihilate the Nazis of New England.”
He reaches beneath the podium and pulls out an ultra-rare mint condition copy of the very first issue, published on the day he was born and stored all these years in a vault in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Indeed, the miracle of his birth takes up most of that issue, depicting first the comet that passed through his village as his spirit descended from the cosmos to lodge in human form and then the bestial suffering of his mother to deliver that man-god hybrid into the mortal realm to face the destiny that had been set aside for him at the dawn of time.
As he reads this issue to the audience, swollen now to include much of the intelligentsia of New England and New York and New Jersey, as well as TV and radio crews broadcasting his voice around the world, he returns to those panels, simultaneously to the state of hearing them read by his mother at the dawn of his own memory and into the action depicted therein, carrying out the daring raids for which he’d already become world-famous by the time of his birth.
He sees the approach to Wieland’s cabin with his yellow-handled Ace Hardware ax, dragging it through the underbrush and over the altar where, in another section of the epic—“another room of the museum,” as he puts it to the audience—his father sacrificed his mother so that the son might live and become the hero of the very comics he was raised to emulate, “a masturbatory-suicidal autogenesis from which absolutely everything else followed.”
As he speaks these words, he swoons in the grip of a feeling at once ominous and delectable, aware that everything he’d planned to say is already contained in the comics he read before he’d read or done anything else. Part of him wants to embrace the relief of this, basking in the feeling of there being nothing left for him to say, no Lecture Notes of his own to read from, while the rest of him wants to flee from this certainty, to ruin everything if need be, simply to find a space that is still off-book, an arena still open to the possibility of an unwritten chapter. Suddenly, he sees the dirty glass walls of the Bridgeport Holocaust Memorial replacing Yale’s burnished wood floors and plush velvet theater seats. His head bobbles and his vision clouds and he sees the audience choking and gagging and flopping to the ground as the gas pours in, but he can no longer tell whether he’s looking out at the room or down at the comic.
“And so the question I want to leave you all with,” he blurts, skipping many of the pages ahead with a flourish whose boldness seems to thrill the panting audience, “at the end of this first lecture, before those who’ve been hand-selected by the powers that be retire with me for lunch at the Faculty Club, is whether it’s possible that I created myself—or that some it of your choosing created me—out of the dead matter of the comics in the same moment that this dead matter came to take the form it took. Did, in other words, the comics, the events they depict, and the events they inspired all come into being at the same time, and if so, how? Thank you. I will see many of you, I’m sure, at the same time next week.”
At the Faculty Club:
Jakob allows the curator, Dalton, the Couple from Another Town, and their acolytes to lead him by both elbows off the stage, through the applause, up a side aisle, and out of the auditorium. They hustle through the crush of photographers on the common outside, past the undergraduate dining hall and the interfaith chapel, across the wide-open quad, along a concrete footpath flanked by the English and Philosophy buildings, and through the gilded doors of the Yale Faculty Club, where Jakob will enjoy the first of six planned post-lecture lunches at which donors and journalists have been promised varying lengths and depths of access to him.
He is seated at the head of a long table already set with champagne bottles in ice baths and, almost as soon as the other guests take their seats according to whatever scheme they’ve agreed to, he hears himself launch into the story of how he died onstage in the middle of the second or third lecture. “No more than the fourth,” he swears, swinging a lobster claw for emphasis. “Of that much I’m certain. I definitely died, right there onstage in the auditorium we’ve all just come from, in the middle of the fourth or the very beginning of the fifth lecture. There’s no way I made it to the sixth. The book is called Five Lectures. Look it up.”
He talks as long as he can, aware that when he stops the questions will set in and his answers, or lack thereof, will do their part to derail the fragile certainty he’s managed to amass that he’s come to the right place and that his life, though it will soon appear to, does not actually end here. Though his private audience is rapt with enthusiasm as he narrates his own death onstage—Jakob is not so detached as to fail to understand the type of behavior that appeals to the type of people who support him and his work—he can feel that he is about to unnerve himself to the point of losing functionality. “I’m not feeling so well,” he interrupts, cutting his own story short. “I need to go back to my room to read my comics in bed.”
~
Jakob rushes to the room which the commissioners of the Eliot Lectures have set aside for him, muscles past the coterie of bodyguards and other attendants who have trailed him since he stepped onstage, and plunges into a gigantic four-postered canopy bed, the kind that exists for him always at the very bottom of any plunge, the wide soft bottom beneath which he still believes he can never fall.
In bed he snuggles in the soft sheets and entertains a fantasy of being a colonial overseer in the deep tropics, wrapped in delicate sweat and rough mosquito netting after a sumptuous dinner on the verandah with the overseers of neighboring plantations. Then he closes his eyes and snuggles deeper, running his hands over the soft, damp sheets and kicking his legs to find the cool spots beneath the light blanket, in no hurry to pull the comics into view because the next instance, that of him reading them up to the point of discovering what happens in his next lectures, up to the fifth, is already so clear in his mind that it feels unnecessary, distasteful even, to act it out with his body as well. A morbid fixation on doubling his attention upon a single graven image rather than spreading it out, as best he can, across the full cool expanse of the Persian silk sheets that Yale has so kindly provided him with.
Still, no sheets remain cool forever. After Jakob has soothed his limbs and torso across every inch of sheet available to soothe them, the moment he knew was coming comes. He leans over to the nightstand, opens the drawer, and finds the comics. He rifles quickly through the back issues tracing his journey along the Connecticut coast, past the pits and the ragged pockets of Old Country nestled between one New London and the next, not stopping—he knows, weary as he is, that he needs to conserve his attention—until he reaches the issue entitled Jakob at Yale, a thick, waterlogged volume with a cover image of him onstage behind the mic, the veins in his forehead and neck and eyes bulging wildly, so much that he shudders upon turning to the first page.
Much as he tries to focus, his attention wanders as soon as the crucial illustration appears before him. He looks down at it and sees nothing but what he already knows, the alarming boredom of a god toying with subjects who can never threaten him, nor offer any further opportunity, preaching to a choir so long-convinced and so bereft of any alternative that neither they nor he are capable of hearing the words coming from his mouth. “He made them to worship his Art!” The comic reads, as Jakob glances down at the page held open on the podium. “Invulnerable to all eventualities, unpunishable for what he’d done, there was nothing left but to take one victory lap after another after another, impressing his subjects who could never be anything but impressed. Having overcome life in his own lifetime, he found he was no longer alive, much as he was also far from dead.”
He swallows, uncertain whether to say this part out loud, nor whether he already has, nor even whether he is still in bed reading about himself onstage, or back onstage, reading about himself in bed. His palms shake and his ears throb as he studies the faces of the Art World packing the auditorium, their eyes unblinking as they sit in their seats and await his next utterance. He reaches down to turn the page, determined to skip past the stalemate and pick up in the next phase of his adventure, but his fingers are so wet they tear through all the remaining pages, removing a thick mass of paper beneath which lies only the back-cover ad for another comic series: Jakob as Nazi.
“Look behind you!” the back cover commands, and he does, turning to see the door to the dressing rooms creak open, a hint of a hand visible by the edge of the knob. The vision is simple and brief, but it’s enough. He sees the power of a god renouncing his domain, turning on the very public he annihilated his family in order to assume dominion over. Without even glancing back to register the effect his decision will have on that public, he hurries to the door, reaching out for the hand he glimpsed, which obligingly grabs hold and pulls him through, beyond the reach of his fame and over the cusp into a run of comics that his mother never read to him and never would have.
III: Jakob as Nazi (1981-2004)
Backstage, Jakob hurries past the racks of comics and other props for the lecture he never gave and cuts through a hall of printing presses already running off his soon-to-be-canonical Five Lectures, with a thick wad of blank pages at the back for the unimaginable sixth. He fights the urge to stop, grab a copy, and return to the lecture stage for a triumphal and now-heretical finale. But the finale is already underway. He shoulders open the first door he sees at the back of the hall and enters a realm of records. Room after room of filing cabinets and desks covered in documents and binders, notaries hanging from the rafters, vats full of ink and archive rooms sealed with foot-thick padlocks.
Roaming among it all, Jakob works to put a passable Holocaust together inside himself before he ends up outdoors with no story to work with. “Here are the awful records,” he says, half-convinced that the Yale audience is still listening. “The sordid facts of what I did. Names and dates.” He chokes, knocking aside a notary who hangs so low her face bounces off his belly. “The events I set in motion to force the next chapter to begin, ensuring that the weakest parts of me could never regrow.”
But even the Eliot Lectures feel cauterized on the far side of this cataclysm, burned off of the body he now inhabits. Burned off along with the name Jakob, which he no longer answers to. Now, the fact of Jakob having given the Eliot Lectures in 1981 means no more than does the fact of J.L. Borges having given them in 1980.
Known to himself only as the wanderer, he journeys on into New England, uncertain whether he’s indoors or outdoors, in the prep area for a main event still to come or immersed in that event already. He passes again through New London and orders a Bass Ale and a plate of fish and chips with tartar sauce and malt vinegar, which the bartender, evincing a look just shy of recognition, says is on the house, though his look sours when he says this, as if he would’ve preferred not to.
The wanderer eats quickly and leaves before any further discussion can occur. He keeps to the coastline, passing a high circus tent with trucks and generators but no people beneath it and then a local football stadium, also full only of equipment, and then he leaves New London and sets out for Old Saybrook and Old Lyme, following what he considers a kind of Silk Road, a route whose significance no one who happened to set foot upon it could fail to perceive.
As he walks and seeks inns to rest in at night and quiet donut shops full of Portuguese elders in the morning, he reflects on the enormity of the crimes he’s committed, so enormous, indeed, that he’s been precluded from recalling their specifics, as if he might slip up and admit something to himself that would compromise the entire mission.
In one such donut shop in what could be Taunton or Saugus or Kingston, Rhode Island, he wonders what mission he’s on, what, even now, might await him. Have I not broken free, into the great non-space, beyond which nothing can follow, not even a name?
“Wieland waited for decades in his cabin in the hills, way up there in Vermont or New Hampshire,” an old woman tells her friend or sister at the table next to his. She dips her cruller in an open-topped paper coffee cup and takes a large wet bite.
“What happened then?”
The first woman swallows and says, “Oh, you know!” But she’s looking to the side now, at the wanderer who, though he can tell he should’ve moved much faster, remains seated long enough for the name Wilhelm Wieland to find him. He looks down at his check for $2.35, a coffee and a cruller, and, sure enough, two wide W’s flash back from the signature line.
“Thank you,” he says, to the ladies and to the boy working the counter, unsure what he’s thanking anyone for but aware that he needs to leave, right now, for it’s a long walk from here to Vermont or New Hampshire and, all at once, he’s started to feel terribly far from home.
~
The next days and weeks pass as Wieland works his way northward, past Boston, past Portland even, and then west, away from the coast, scarred everywhere by events that can never again be mentioned. He sets out into the region’s interior as if for the first time, though he can clearly picture the cabin in which he will await his destiny.
He journeys on foot along autumnal lanes and by the banks of reservoirs and eats slices of pie in general stores in the centers of towns that have no other establishments save for a church, a post office, and a tiny columned Carnegie library. Finally, after a wild superabundance of such towns, full of the furtive glances of strangers, the aura of the past clinging all around him but never to the point of eliciting questions, he arrives in the town where he will stay.
He applies for a deed in the real estate office, though both he and the realtor know this is perfunctory, and both share a sigh of melancholy to admit how little their consent is required to set the next phase in motion. There is nothing to do, they both know, except to behave as though some form of contingency is still possible. That history neither ended long ago nor came unthreaded before it began.
Up in the cabin, which sits atop the mountain that overshadows the town to the west, Wieland sets to work conjuring Jakob from the surrounding landscape. “The boy will appear at my doorstep to kill me for what I’ve done,” he writes, aware that it is, finally, beyond him to say whether, in forcing a genuine Third Age to begin, he will do so by summoning a demon or summoning a god. When he closes his eyes, he can see the Ferris wheel creaking in the valley below, swelling until, if he doesn’t force himself out of his chair and into bed, it comes level with his window and stops there so the boy inside can peer out and into the cabin’s sparse sitting room and whisper, “I will come only in my own good time.”
In bed, Wieland dreams of the glass enclosures commemorating the horrors he perpetrated upon the people of the Old Country, condemning them to strangle within their own sacred beach and sugar shack and county fair memories, prisoners of dioramas they would never think to try to escape. His dreams carry him up to the glass and then, as if it were no more than a fleshy curtain, through it, so that he awakens every morning, if he makes it till morning, from a pit of shrieking ancestors, the whole deep line that led to his coming onto the scene and will, if reality works the way he imagines it does, soon lead to Jakob’s chance to purge him from it.
~
Sometimes, when he can’t sleep and can’t bear the still nighttime hours with nothing to do but sit in his armchair and write the name Jakob a thousand times in tiny print in his journal, Wieland steps into his slippers and nightshirt and stumbles down the mountain, arriving in town just before dawn. He drags through the sleeping streets and up to the back door of the high school, where the drunken janitor, an old friend from the War, lets him in through the emergency exit of the auditorium.
Wieland pats this poor man on the back, shares a whiff of his whiskey breath, and crosses the rows of empty seats to take his place onstage. Behind the silent microphone, he spreads out his Lecture Notes, opens to the last page he’s written on, and picks up where he left off. He talks and talks, suppressing his heavy accent to the extent that he can, narrating the story of his life and the cataclysm that befell New England. He dwells upon the sorry tale of the first Jakob, a false prophet who became a Demiurge before throwing away the power he’d amassed, spraying his seed across the barren fields of the Art World. Wieland watches the sun rise outside the window and then the lights come on in the auditorium and the children file in to take their seats, the younger ones led by their teachers and the older ones jostling and shoving one another, and then, as if this assembly had been planned long ago, Wieland cracks his knuckles, wipes his eyes, and scans the crowd, working from face to face, skipping not a single one, as he says, as loudly and clearly as he can, “One of you, sitting here this morning, is him. One of you has to be. There is no more time to waste. If you wish to know what became of New England, and what will become of you, unless Jakob kills me once and for all, simply ask your parents. They will be all too happy to explain. No, no, never again. Whichever of you is he, stand up, hear me now, take the mantle that has been passed down through the generations but can be passed down no further. Go to Ace Hardware, purchase a yellow-handled utility ax, and meet me on the altar in front of my cabin on the mountaintop at dawn. If your New England stock has not already degenerated beyond the point where you can hear what I’m saying and understand what it means, then heed. There is no more time to waste, there is no more…”
~
He talks for as long as he can before whatever counter-reality is in effect here catches up with him and the same security guard who opened the door in the night rushes onstage to force him out, past the principal, a much-degraded Dalton who appears roughly awoken from a deep dream.
Shaken but determined, Wieland staggers away from the school and across town to the last remaining pub, where, even though it’s barely breakfast time, he orders a Bass Ale and a plate of fish and chips with tartar sauce and malt vinegar, and he catches his breath, preparing for the long, slow day that will deposit him back in his cabin at nightfall.
As these nights in the cabin progress, the summer sky fills with stars, drawing them inward from all other skies, leaving the universe empty and cold. Wieland pulls his rocking chair away from the windows and sits in the center of his living room when he can’t sleep, writing in his journal by the light of the stars. Then, when this too has grown untenable, he takes to shambling outside and lying on the altar.
With his head on the sacrificial stone, he looks up at the sky and watches the stars simmer and clot, dripping downward from the depths and, though the point is clear enough already, he musters as much respect as his body contains to watch while the stars resolve into a constellation of the very sacrifice he is lying there anticipating. In every direction, from one tree line to the other and across the dusty purple expanse in between, constellations grow together depicting a young boy beheading an old man upon an altar on a mountaintop, both of them desperate for reasons that are at once opposite and identical, unified with fanatical focus on the task of ending the long, long Second Age both have emerged from far too often, reborn into the lurch between past and present as lesser and lesser versions of themselves.
The sky mimics this redundancy, mocking it or venerating it with thousands and thousands of the same constellation, blotting out the moon and the North Star and the Big Dipper and all the signs of the known world, replacing them with Jakob swinging his ax down upon Wieland’s neck again and again and again, until the night is so full of stars it becomes a kind of day and Wieland can’t lie there any longer and so in that heavy new light he staggers down the mountain to make his speech at the high school again.
~
After the guard forces him out, he gropes through the starlight to the tobacco and stationary shop that carries German-language newspapers for the town’s not insignificant expat population. He passes the central square with its peony patches and carp pond, old men smoking cigars on one set of benches and old women doing crosswords on another, and ducks beneath the wide awning of the news kiosk, where the music and sports and horse magazines hang, and into the dark, pipe-smelling interior.
He passes Heinz, the old proprietor who sometimes evinces recognition and sometimes does not, and who either way Wieland prefers not to engage because the man has a habit of resting his cigarette on a stack of dry papers whenever he gets to talking about the old days. Today, he simply smokes and stares at a crinkled Canterbury Tales propped open beneath several paper coffee cups, saying nothing as Wieland presses past the used books and other ephemera, making his way to the well-kept German section in back.
As he does, rifling through the newest edition of Der Spiegel and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, both dated August 7, 2004, a small, damp box by his feet catches his eye. Despite his bad back and a final, weak twinge of revulsion at taking what he can clearly see will be the final step, he kneels, past shelves of old Jakob as Nazi comics, some in mint condition and some so waterlogged they won’t lie flat, glances back at Heinz and, as quickly as he can, pulls the tape off the top of the box and peers inside. Nestled in straw and sawdust sits a dirty glass cube measuring about a foot on each side. This time Wieland doesn’t divert his attention as he pulls the cube from the box, sits with his back to the comics, and presses the glass to his eye.
Inside, a young boy and his mother wait by the front door of this same stationery shop, its sign identical to the way it is now but far less worn by the years, thus appearing both newer and older. Wieland presses the cube so hard against his eye that its grubby slick surface crushes his lashes and lids and then he’s inside, disembodied, hovering above the boy and his mother who wait, a little warily now, as if they’ve grown aware of an unwelcome intruder, lurking just out of sight with an agenda contrary to their own.
~
Jakob and his mother eat Danishes and drink coffee—hers black and his mostly milk—while they wait for the truck. His impatience at the truck’s failure to arrive right away is matched only by his delight in spending this moment with her, just the two of them, on no one else’s clock, answerable to no one and nothing save for the habits they’ve developed here together. Therefore, when the truck finally does arrive, Jakob is both elated and crushed, aware, even as a boy, that the anticipation will always overshadow the anticipated. Nevertheless, the truck’s arrival is a glory all its own. He and his mother drop their cups in the trash and behold the gleaming Jakob as Nazi Hunter logo painted across the truck’s side, radiant in the summer sun. Jakob salutes the cartoon boy draped in an American flag upon the truck’s corrugated surface as it comes to a halt in the space outside and the driver hops out and jogs around back to open the cargo compartment. Heinz puts his cigarette on a stack of papers and peers out the darkened front door of his shop at the last possible second, feigning obliviousness until the driver with his overflowing boxes is already almost inside.
Jakob and his mother hide behind the horse magazines as if they intended to steal the comics until the transaction is through and the driver has gotten back in the truck and pulled out, off to the next town where Jakob sometimes loves and sometimes hates to imagine that another version of himself and his mother are just now buying their Danishes and coffee to await the truck that will arrive in fifteen minutes.
~
Then, when the coast is clear, they hurry inside and plunge down on the new boxes, pulling a fresh, ink-smelling issue off the top of the pile, or from just beneath the top if the top issue has gotten creased in transit, and they take it to the counter and Heinz, unaware of the ritual he plays a part in, rings them up without ceremony, one eye on his Canterbury Tales, and then they’re outside, crossing the street to the park, where Jakob and his mother sit on a bench by the carp pond, between the old men smoking cigars and the old women doing crosswords, and open the new issue, entitled Jakob as Messiah.
The first page features a black-and-white image of an old man staring into a glass cube in the dingy back corner of a stationery shop. Jakob snuggles in to his mother’s side as the two of them dwell on this image and, though both feel the presence of a dark force overhead, a formless evil staring down from the other side of the sky, sucking out oxygen that will not be replaced, neither says a word because, on the next page, the Messiah has already begun his journey, out of the stationery store and into the Ace Hardware across the street, where he buys the yellow-handled utility ax that, on the following page, he straps to his belt and carries up the mountain.
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, The Berlin Wall, and the Dodge City Trilogy, as well as the story collections Drifter and The Squimbop Condition. He's online at: www.raviddice.com.