Chapter Six

        "Horrible, Adam. Horrible." The old producer patted Adam. He had a tear in his eye that Adam didn't see, so Adam didn't see the fury glinting in the tear, either. "So, what did you do when you left the commune?"
        "I went to Nashville and hung out at Vanderbilt. Then I got involved in a little theater. Acted. That was nice. I wrote some TV commercials there and in Memphis. It isn't really writing, of course.
        "Then I came back here when my mother died. I tried to write. Then my father died. God rest them. I couldn't write. I ran into you once about that time."
        "When was this, 1980?" Felix indexed.
        "Yeah. I just walked the streets for two years. And went to funerals. My uncles are all dead, too. Only one aunt left. On the Adamsky side I only have two cousins left. On the Adams side--I don't know. I suppose there are as many as always. I never knew them very well...
        "I tried for a long time to get my family and funerals and death and Hollywood and the commune and the city down on paper. But not even poems came then. Just the phrases, sentences. I bet I've got five novels' worth of sentences. But they dangle hopelessly. I bet I'm the master of the million dangling sentences," Adam laughed.
        "Some of them must converge somewhere," said Felix.
        "In heaven they converge, Felix. I have the compulsion to write the world down, but I've forgotten how to place it in the universe...I wrote a short story last week. That was good."
        "About what?" asked Felix.
        "About wanting power. Power over Kiki. McGuire has all this power...
        "When I got done walking the streets here, I was furious. I had let every power go. I hadn't kept anything for myself. I was thirty years old and I'd never expected to live that long. I'd given away everything, not knowing how long life is. Money, my plays, my first movie. I'd given away my parents by not being here in their last years... And I'd given Kiki away because I wouldn't dominate her, fight McGuire by playing his game of mind control.
        "I couldn't conform. I couldn't settle down to a vegetable garden with the doctrine as my meat. Cannibalism, Felix, the feeding upon others' brains. Feeding on souls instead of freeing souls. Do you know what I'm talking about, Felix? This is a terrible thing, and people let it happen to them.
        "But McGuire won anyway. Every time I tried to write, there'd be this socio-political goddamned argument polluting it. Arguments against McGuire, the commune, psychic tyranny. So, see, they had won. I couldn't write."
        "Essays instead of plays," Felix nodded. "Debate teams instead of characters."
        "Dogma and counter-dogma instead of dialogue," Adam nodded. "But these bits and pieces I see in the world, the sparks and clumps of darkness have nothing to do with political theory. Anyway, I went back to the commune then."
        "Why in hell?"
        "To see if I could win some power back. But when I got there and looked into the vacuum of Kiki's eyes, I realized there'd never been much in any of it. Not in her, the rest of them there, not in Hollywood, of course, not in the rest of America, and not even anything in those things I thought I'd seen as a kid and put into my plays. That I'd made the whole thing up. Made the world up. My vision wasn't lost. It had been an invention of air, of infantile madness in the first place."
        "But if you'd made the vision up, why couldn't you use it over or make up a new vision?" Felix asked.
        "Like McGuire, huh? Made-up visions. Well, I went to Hollywood again, next. Does that suffice? Cut and Dried Dreams was being made into a movie at last. Even though I'd sold the rights to it, I went there to try to have some power over it. All that happened was that I threw these silly tantrums. In public, no less. You undoubtedly read about it in the papers... Is there anything more psychotic or corrupt than someone who no longer believes? I mean, I was trying to push a vision I no longer had. So, I guess I had grown up. I had become as stupid, if not as shrewd, as all the rest.
        "But, so, anyway, I came back here...whipped. And I've been praying alternatively, to have vision again, and praying never to have vision." Adam stopped and laughed grimly. Then wiped his eyes. "But, god, you know. Seeing the Paradise again. It is too bad I can't write a play for it. I would love to. Did I tell you that it's beautiful?"
        Felix smiled. "It's pretty, but nothing without a play."
        Adam got up from the perch on the edge of the stage and danced around a bit on the boards. "I don't remember, Lord. Did you see my grandfather act here?"
        "I saw him."
        "Was he great? I mean, really great?"
        "He played the most sublime, most powerful Hamlet I have ever seen."
        "Really?"
        "Yes."
        Adam sighed with great pleasure. He thought then of The King of Giggles. Tears fell into his eyes. A panic fell on him as if all the scenery from all the scenes of his life were falling on him. He was trapped. He had sold his birthright. He had failed art. He had failed social thought. He had failed his father's family and his mother's family. He was neither Adamsky nor Adams. He had no power. He had forgotten his lines. He had no stage. No place to take a stand from within himself.
        "Really, Adam," Felix said in his best soothing voice, "you needn't write the play. Tell me about the praying. To whom have you been praying?"
        "It never goes beyond my brain," Adam answered in a whisper that barely reached Felix. "There's a steel helmet clamped over my brain, under my skull. The words reverberate. Mock me. My brain is as empty of prayer and God and plays as this theater."
        "Ha! I've been thinking of theaters as minds lately. I've hear it said that television is society's brain. But theater is more like society's mind."
        "How so?" Adam asked.
        "It works out a number of ways. Freudianly, the lobby could be the superego. It's the facade, the place where society interfaces, assembles, gains access. The theater itself, and the stage, is like the ego, the place where the struggle takes place, where the show goes on."
        "Oh, and backstage is, ah, the primitive underpinnings. The unformed libido?" Adam suggested.
        "Or," said Felix, "the audience is the superego, society. Full of rules and laws and dogmatic understanding. They come with their set notions. And the production, the play is the healthy ego. Trying to get the superego to have commerce with the libido, the id. See, the ego is shrewd. It uses the same language as the superego, but it stretches meaning around. Exercises language. Makes it flow, fly. The ego is impassioned. It brings the yearnings of the subconscious out. All in all, the ego, the play, makes the overcivilized superego and the uncivilized id civilized. This ego gives order, but an order full of life. Without art, actors would all be murderers. Without art, audiences would be victims of murders--or murderers themselves. Slaughtering judges."
        "But that's a bit dramatic isn't it? For sure, it's too much responsibility."
        "Dramatic? Like the world? Look, traditionally, anciently, what was theater? A way to mold and express fear and hatred, passions, mysteries. Law and the reason for law acted out. And as for the responsibility, really, Adam, you don't have to write the play."
        "Stop saying that. You taunt me."
        "You taunt yourself. What makes you think your gift was yours to give away?" Felix said. He was up now, pacing the stage near Adam's pacings.
        "If it's a gift and it's mine, I can give it as I please."
        "Then why haven't you given it?"
        "I thought you said I have given it away."
        "You said that. The turn of the screw is that you've given it away by keeping it. And it's turned on you like a cornered animal. Excuse my mixing of metaphors."
        "How I love a paradox. You could rename this 'The Paradox Theatre'."
        "Certainly!" laughed Felix. "Just think of all the contrasts, the contradictions, the improbables, the unexplainables that have lived here."
        "I'd rather not," said Adam. He froze and looked suspiciously around him on the stage and out into the theater.
        "Shakespeare and burlesque. The Victorian Age, the Atomic Age. The wars. The depressions. Peace. Prosperity. The King of Giggles. The Prodigy Playwright." The old producer was walking tighter and tighter circles around Adam.
        "Don't! I..."
        "The genius. The child writer. The infant with a vision."
        "Don't. Don't."
        "And the thirty-five-year-old with writer's block. The silent messiah. Messiah of his Age. Silent messiah in the Age of Noise."
        "Don't, Felix. It isn't fair."
        "The one who has watched and suffered, and seen and felt, and analyzed for a decade and a half. Who has seen all the foibles and strengths of this inch of time in history. Seen how this time exemplifies all of the history of man, and how this Age goes contrary to all other Ages. And you can't say it. Can't paint it."
        "Stop, goddamn it."
        "And so you're a schizo. You're like Abraham and Isaac in one. You've heard voices. You have visions. And you're your own sacrifice."
        "I don't hear voices. Just my own. And yours. Memories of other real voices. Visions? I should be so lucky." Adam was shivering in the eighty degree theater.
        "And the voice tells the man to kill the boy. Where's the rock, Adam? Where's the altar for the sacrifice? Or haven't you been told that part yet?"
        "This is psycho garbage!"
        "Sacrifice the boy. But what would become of the man? If the boy and the man are one and the same. If the boy dies, what becomes of the man, Adam?"
        "Oh, I get it. God as a quizmaster, right? Okay. The boy dies, the man dies. I'm not suicidal. I don't hear voices. In fact, I don't do much of anything but hang out in a gray mist of my own creation. Okay?
        "Look, here are your checks." Adam pulled an envelope out of an inside coat pocket. "They're all here except for two. I bought a word processor. I'll pay you back. I have to go now."
        He jumped down off of the stage. But the houselights were off. He felt the ancient fear of the dark and froze in the grayly lit orchestra pit. Felix pushed some buttons. The lights came up. But not before Adam had stood toe-to-toe with multiple ghosts. Felix lowered himself from the stage. "I'll walk you to the door," Felix said. Halfway up the aisle he offered Adam the envelope. "You may have these, Adam. You don't have to write the play."
        "Don't you ever give up?" asked Adam, refusing the checks with a gesture.
        "Yes and no."
        "Ah! An enigma! The inscrutable owner of the Paradox Theatre speaks in enigmas."
        They were still chuckling when they reached the gutted lobby. Adam looked around at the refurbishing carnage and said, "Your superego needs fixing."
        "So does yours," said Felix.
        And they laughed again. But Adam in mid-laugh felt a sweet and salty swabbing in the back of his throat. He hadn't tasted this since childhood. It had been a flag of sensation that had dotted his life from the dawn of memory until some time around the first days of the plays. And then it disappeared until this moment.
        The taste marked leave-takings and other events of import or peculiar loveliness. It meant that a particular gestalt would never again be assembled. It meant that something so horrible or so wonderful had happened and Adam had been so swept along by it that he had forgotten to record it in detail. But the taste at the back of his throat was the chemical byproduct exuded by some process of the brain racing back to remember and place the memory in the long-term banks. A painting was hung in Adam's artist's gallery.
        At the door to the street, the two said good-bye and shook hands. A pact with the devil, Adam saw. A sealing of the deal not to write a play, he felt.
        Adam found himself out on the street alone. Out in the cold alone. On the gritty sidewalks. Night had come. The world was morbidly large. Monotonously organized. Naked of charms. Even though he had wrestled with Felix in the Paradise, at least the arguments had created a sense of form. Now the March wind wore straight into his bones. Rain had begun.
        For one moment the neon lighting from the neighboring establishments danced in their colors.
        Adam heard by the magic of semi-insanity Yvonne Yvette's windchime laughter.