Complication Read online

  I don’t know how his kind of smarts served him in Central Europe, but it hardly mattered. Paul had gone to Prague for love, to hear him tell it, though he would’ve sooner worn a Cubs jersey at Comiskey than used the word love earnestly when speaking of a woman in the company of men. While hanging out with some buddies at a bar on Cermak, he’d run into a girl named Sarka, a Czech who worked as an au pair for a couple in the Gold Coast during the day and tended bar at night. They started hanging out together. Then she had some kind of visa trouble and had to go back to the Czech Republic, re-apply for a work permit. They’d only been seeing each other for three or four months by this time, but she’d invited him to come stay with her in Prague and wait out the slow churn of bureaucracy. When my brother told me about it, I figured that would be the last I’d hear of Sarka. A week later he called me and said he was leaving.

  I’d asked if he knew anything at all about the Czech Republic. Its history, its language, food, culture, climate. Could he even name a famous Czech person? Could I? he’d countered. Franz Kafka, I said. Miloš Forman, Martina Navratilova, Václav Havel, Nadia Comaneci (that one was a trap—I knew she was Romanian). Also the model who married that guy from the Cars. Paul laughed, said I’d just made up those names. And even if I hadn’t, how famous could these people be if he’d never heard of them? Then he rattled a bunch of Czech names I didn’t recognize. All were hockey players or porn stars. And Paulina Porizkova, he said, was the name of the woman once married to that lucky bastard from the Cars.

  Nadia Comaneci, he added, was Bulgarian.

  I took a shower. Clean tub, good water pressure. Housekeeping knocked, housekeeping entered, I kept showering. Once they’d gone I toweled off and got dressed. My suit reeked of cigarettes from the Black Rabbit, but I had nothing else to wear. As I was putting on my father’s shoes, I noticed a large manila envelope sitting atop the writing desk in the corner. My name (or Dad’s name) was written upon it in block letters. I walked over and ripped it open. Inside was a small booklet.

  Rudolf’s Curiosities

  Art and Oddities from the Collection of

  Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II

  15 July–15 September 2002

  GALLERIA ČERTOVKA

  20 U Lužického Semináře, Malá Strana, Praha 1

  Even with the date and Čertovka and Malá Strana printed on the front, only when I started flipping through the pages and landed on a description of the watch itself did I understand what I was looking at.

  EXHIBIT 23: THE RUDOLF COMPLICATION

  The Rudolf Complication timepiece was originally designed for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II during the waning years of the sixteenth century.

  Rudolf II (1552–1612) was an enigmatic ruler, a highly cultivated yet deeply superstitious man given to bouts of melancholy and paranoia. He maintained a vast collection of art and esoterica from all over the world inside Prague’s Hradčany Castle, which acted as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire during his reign. Rudolf also provided refuge for Europe’s greatest intellectuals and eccentrics, ranging in reputation from scientists and mathematicians Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, to heretical visionary philosopher Giordano Bruno, to rogue alchemist Michael Sendivogius, to scheming astrologer Geronimo Scotta.

  Englishmen Edward Kelley (a.k.a. Edward Talbot, a.k.a. Edward Engelender) was one of the more brazen charlatans to win the confidence of the Hapsburg ruler. Alleged necromancer, partner of esteemed Elizabethan scholar John Dee, and for a time Rudolf’s favorite alchemist, Kelley eventually went afoul of the Emperor for his inability to produce the promised Philosophers’ Stone and was imprisoned in Křivoklát Castle, west of Prague. During a subsequent escape attempt, he fell from a high tower and broke his leg.

  Upon being pardoned, it is believed Kelley designed the watch in an attempt to salvage his relationship with Rudolf II. Said to be made of magical metals inscribed with cabbalistic symbols that Kelley reputedly learned from famed contemporary Rabbi Löew, the watch contained a hidden compartment that displayed the hours running backward, making time metaphorically stand still for its wearer and granting him literal immortality. For a fearful Emperor enamored of the mystical and the mechanical, there could be no greater curiosity.

  Rudolf is said to have paid a large sum for its commission. The details surrounding the completion and delivery of the Rudolf Complication are lost to history, but the Emperor must have felt he’d once again been duped, for he had Kelley imprisoned a second time, this time in Hněvín Castle. In 1597, following a second failed escape attempt that earned him a second broken leg, Kelley committed suicide. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the outskirts of Most village in northern Bohemia.

  Rudolf II himself died fifteen years later, and his treasures were lost to waves of conquerors that swept through Prague following the disastrous Battle of White Mountain. Missing for centuries, Rudolf’s prized watch has only recently been returned to the people of the Czech Republic. This exhibition marks its first public display.

  Ghosted under the text were twin illustrations of the watch, one with the case closed, one opened. Closed, a stylized heraldic engraving of a lion stood out from the watch’s gold cover. Inside, black roman numerals circled the yellowed ivory face, and there was a single tapered hand to indicate the hour, no minute hand, nothing for ticking off seconds. A portrait of Emperor Rudolf wearing the piece was featured in the brochure. Jowly, bulbous nosed, heavy-lidded, and long of chin—considering the artist surely flattered the royal subject, Rudolf must’ve looked like the Richard Nixon of his day. The watch was shaped like a tambourine and not much smaller than one, less like a watch you’d wear on your wrist than one of those clocks East Coast hip-hop clowns draped around their necks in the eighties.

  How much was it worth?

  Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

  Paul did think big. Had to give him that.

  Never clearly, rarely deeply, but often big.

  Smart in his own way.

  Beneath Rudolf’s glum stare, on the corner of the page, someone had penned a message in black ink still so fresh it glistened under the morning light streaming in through the hotel window.

  Astronomical Clock, Old Town Square, 9 am.

  Vera had evidently bribed one of the maids or another hotel employee to bring this to my room. She’d bumped up our meeting and changed the location, a shrewd maneuver as there would now be no time for me to get wired with a listening device or arrange for an undercover cop to tail me to our meeting, a notion that had occurred to me and been instantly rejected as ridiculous even as I tossed and turned with jetlag at 4 AM.

  I looked up the Astronomical Clock in Prague Unbound. It was a big tourist attraction, one of the most famous clocks in Europe. “Legends abound regarding this celebrated horloge,” said the guidebook. “Tales of conspiracy and mayhem and eye-gouging. Pay them no more heed than you would a drunken Turk.” I read the sentence twice, but it came out the same both times. Guess the cultural sensitivity movement hadn’t reached Czech tourist literature yet.

  I wondered if Vera was being ironic in selecting a famous old clock as our new meeting place as I tore the cover page from the booklet in case I needed the address later, folded it inside Prague Unbound, and slipped the guidebook in my jacket pocket. The two figures hunched over their chess game in the painting were still pondering their next moves as I headed out.

  INSIDE THE MIRROR MAZE–PART II

  AUDIO RECORDING #3113b

  Date: September 26, 1984 [Time unspecified]

  Subject: Eliška Reznícková

  Case: #1331—Incident at Zrcadlové Bludiště

  Interview session #5

  Location: Unknown

  Investigator: Agent #3553

  AGENT #3553: You then took the funicular up the hill?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: It was broken.

  AGENT #3553: So you walked up the hill? Comrade Reznícková? Please pay attention. You took the tram to the base of Petřín. You went up the hill. Y
ou were carrying the accordion case.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I never said that.

  AGENT #3553: We have witnesses. Where were you going?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Ask your witnesses.

  AGENT #3553: Where did you go after exiting the funicular? You said you rode it up Petřín Hill, correct?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I said the funicular was broken.

  AGENT #3553: Who were you planning to meet atop Petřín? What were you planning to do? Where were you going?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Matthew twenty-five thirty-one.

  AGENT #3553: Good, an address. Where is this Matthew Street, exactly?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: It’s not a street. It’s from the Bible. Matthew 25:31. “When the Son of Man shall come in his glory and all the holy angels with him, then he shall sit upon the throne of his glory. And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, and the goats on the left.”

  AGENT #3553: Why the left?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: You’d have to ask Matthew.

  AGENT #3553: A political allegory?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I’m not that clever.

  AGENT #3553: Do you consider yourself a religious person?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I avoid considering myself when possible.

  AGENT #3553: How is it you know the Bible so well? This passage clearly has special meaning for you. Why?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: It doesn’t. I’m tired. I need sleep. I can’t be of any use to you when I don’t know what I’m saying.

  AGENT #3553: Allow us to read you something.

  [Papers being shuffled—duration 4 seconds]

  AGENT #3553: “ . . . and Prague below a sleeping city where time passed like so many snakes through a bramble, each era leaving behind its molten skin cast in stone. But this Sunday morning as he stands on the Letná Plain, no time passes and the city looks not so much sleeping as abandoned. The Butcher once read that the Americans had invented a new weapon which could obliterate entire populations in a flash but leave buildings and bridges and highways completely intact. The neutron bomb, they called it. The Butcher envisions a Prague devoid of people and life, the city a silent, sprawling monument to the end of itself. But then a bird twitters, a little goat girl skips into view on the other side of the empty plain, and the city is resurrected.”

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Please stop.

  AGENT #3553: “Snow slips from a rooftop in the distance and lands with a muffled thump in a drift below and The Butcher blinks and blinks and tries to retrieve the thought he was thinking but finds his thoughts are gone and will not be summoned. The little girl in the brown dress appears at the far end of the empty Letná Plain, and when she walks by him he snatches her up and hoists her upside down by her naked rear ankle hooves and drives her goat head into the concrete. She cries and brays and her arms flail and then she doesn’t cry and her arms stop moving and her goat blood spills over everything. He stretches her right arm limp upon the pavement and withdraws his knife and rolls his eyes to the blue heavens. The blade comes down and her five-fingered hoof is no longer part of her body. The Butcher slips the appendage in his pocket. His fingers intertwine with hers in a secret embrace as he walks down the hill, the old city vibrating and shimmering before him.

  [Silence—duration 5 seconds]

  AGENT #3553: Do you recognize this passage?

  [Silence—duration 2 seconds]

  AGENT #3553: This is your writing, correct? You didn’t tell us you were a writer.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Your evidence I am may be evidence I’m not. But yes, it’s mine. It’s a project I’m working on. For my own amusement. It has nothing to do with anything.

  AGENT #3553: It’s demoralizing.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: I can assure you no one has been demoralized but myself.

  AGENT #3553: Still, there are a number of elements we find interesting. Particularly your evident obsession with this Right Hand of God figure.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: It’s hardly an obsession. Just an interest. Really it’s you people who should be interested. Don’t you think?

  AGENT #3553: Let’s talk about your protagonist. You mention in passing that his proper name is Martin Vlasák, but he self-identifies according to his vocation, referring to himself as “The Butcher.” We find this interesting, as your own surname, Reznícková, is a feminization of one Czech word for “butcher.” Furthermore, the entire piece is in the first person, written in the form of diary entries, and set in the present.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: If you’re insinuating that I’m playing some kind of literary shell game—

  AGENT #3553: When did you author the passage I just read to you? Before or after you went up Petřín?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Before. Long before, months ago.

  AGENT #3553: Your neighbors in the Kosmonautů complex reported excessive toilet flushing the night before you were arrested.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Really? And just what is considered excessive? Is there a limit recommended by the Ministry of Toilets?

  AGENT #3553: We know you were trying to dispose of your writing. Why didn’t you flush this document, too? Did you really think we wouldn’t find it? Let’s read another passage, where your hero goes to a tavern called the White Rabbit. Familiar ring to it, no?

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: It’s nothing to do with the Black Rabbit, before you start down that path. The name refers to a Jefferson Airplane song, which is itself a reference to Alice in Wonderland.

  AGENT #3553: Let’s listen to what you wrote. “Ten to midnight inside the White Rabbit and smoke crawls thick along the ceiling. The Butcher doesn’t need to look at the clock. He knows it’s nearly closing time by the number of condensation marks from emptied glasses forming disjointed ringlets on the tabletops, by the way conversations have slurred into blinkered repetitions rife with sloppy hand gestures and emphatic nods that threaten to send their nodders headlong to the floor. President Husák was on TV yesterday, asking the hardworking people of Czechoslovakia not to drink so much. Maybe this is their way of protesting, of living in truth.”

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: A fictional character is saying these things.

  AGENT #3553: Indifference is an obstacle to progress that even fictional entities must work to overcome.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Oh my. Well, I’ll keep that in mind in the future. Do I get to sleep now?

  AGENT #3553: Let me continue. “Among these men are many thrust from their former lives, exiled from their truer selves. Unproduced playwrights, cameraless filmmakers, tenure-stripped professors, decommissioned architects. They now work as street sweepers, coal shovelers, and drill press operators. They wash windows; they scrub corpses. They pretend to work, and the government pretends to pay them. The Butcher sometimes thinks of his fellow drinkers as old bears in hibernation sleeping through a winter that just won’t end. Other times he envisions the White Rabbit as some kind of spiritual bomb shelter where irradiated souls could for a few hours and imagine they’d remained untainted by the psychic fallout occurring all around them, where they could dream of some velvet morning when they would emerge from the darkness triumphant and whole, blinking into a bright, sunlit future. But none of them are whole anymore, and the future doesn’t even know they exist.”

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: Alright, stop. We both know this conversation isn’t really about anything I’ve written. Can we quit pretending this is about some manuscript you found at my apartment?

  AGENT #3553: So you are at last willing to concede that you have some understanding of why we asked for your assistance.

  REZNÍCKOVÁ: His name is Vokov4.

  [Silence—duration 3 seconds]