Marx, Damien and Barnaby Rutledge

Our class meeting for War and Imperialism that day was a lot of preliminary discussions the need of empires to expand, the nature of Capitalism and a great deal of Marxist, proto-Marxist, neo-Marxist and pseudo-Marxist theory that made me want to grind my teeth right out of my head. I respect the man’s ideas enormously, don’t get me wrong; but I hate the way he reduces all the humans in his philosophies to bees in a hive. Unfeeling, unthinking entities that exist, perform their role and die. There is no room for human greed (outside of the greed for money), lust, love, generosity—no room for all those quirky, irrational and spontaneous emotions and actions that make humans….well, human. And don’t even get me started on how many times people felt thing in the course of this discussion.

The two most overused words in the English language in this current age of individual expression are “I feel”. It is not simply enough anymore to “think” something, to “know” something, or to “doubt” something. According to Lydia, “I feel that Marx’s theories about slave labor do not take into account the dual dependencies of the slave and the master adequately.” Similarly, according to Caroline, “I feel that the concept of Capitalism as a finite entity is,” here she stopped, moved her hands around in large circles and never properly finished her thought. Or feeling, as the case may be.

“I know what you mean.” Sam jumped into the gap left in the conversation. “I feel that the progression from Capitalism to Communism isn’t thoroughly explored in any of the writings we were assigned.”

I jammed the nib of my fountain pen into the paper of my notebook so hard that the tip split and ink began to dribble out of the pen and down the page, a line of aqua-green blood that dried presently into a comet-shaped stain on the margin of my notes.

“Well,” said a low, measured voice from across the small room, “I think we might be missing the fact that this is a guideline—a hypothesis, if you will—more than it is a blueprint for the way of the future.”

I looked up and caught Ned staring directly at me, a small smile lifting the corner of his mouth. And I felt a great sense of relief knowing that there was someone else in the room with a suitable grasp of the English language. And I thought about his invitation for coffee after class and then I felt an enormous wave of trepidation hit me squarely in the solar plexus.

I don’t do coffee. I don’t do pleasant conversation. And dear God, I don’t flirt. I don’t understand the complex dance of body language and spoken words, or the rules of who calls whom and when and how one folds ones hand to express interest, or the way a blink can alert someone to another’s intentions…the whole thing is just some kind of over-elaborate mating dance that makes little, if any sense to me, and I wish fervently that we could all just evolve past it and move on. If he wanted to talk about tank formations at the Battle of Cambrai, or the proper method for removing oil stains from cloth-bound books, I’d be fine. But looking at that smile. I knew this wasn’t going to be a business meeting. And I knew that this couldn’t end well.

All too soon, our post-modern meeting about Marx, which by now had the air of a self-help group with the amount of feelings being thrown around, ended. I slid my notebook back into my bag, tucked by still-weeping pen into the side pocket and grabbed the shoulder strap, swinging the bag over my head as I stood up. And nearly collided with Ned who was standing next to my chair.

“Oh—hi!” I said, breathless for no good reason.

“Hello.” He did the grinning thing again. “You still up for that coffee?”

“Definitely. I have work at 2pm, but I’m free ‘til then.” I replied, wondering what rabbit had gained control of my speech and motor functions as we walked down the seven flights of stairs to the ground level and negotiated our way out of the building.

“Do you have a preference?” Ned slid his hands into his pockets and looked over to me.

“Not especially.” I figured shorter sentences were probably best for now.

“There’s a nice quiet place just behind the National…fancy a bit of a walk?’

“Sounds great.” I smiled genuinely. The view from Waterloo Bridge is one of my favorites in the whole city. From one side, you can see St. Paul’s, the lazy curves of 30 St. Mary’s Axe (more familiarly known as the Gherkin after some reporters squinted too hard and decided it looked more like a pickle than a massive lipstick, or, more accurately, a disturbingly-large Freudian slip plunked down in the middle of the City), and a scattering of cranes along the horizon, rising up like ghostly question marks over the city. On the other side, you have Parliament, the London Eye (which gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies just to watch) and the MI-6 Building, which frankly looks like an enormous Lego-creation squatting in front of the Thames. It’s beautiful view of all those lovely, odd things that make you realize quite definitely where you are, and how fiendishly small you are in comparison.

It’s also one of the most perversely windy parts of the City, a fact that escaped me until we were actually on and bridge and a blast of air grabbed all my hair and shoved it in my face. When I tried to sweep it back, it merely whipped back around my head, tangling and snarling together in a knot behind my right ear. I glanced surreptitiously at Ned, who was scanning the horizon over St. Paul’s. The fringes of his already unruly mob of hair fluttered and fell, framing his face and those sharp, dark eyes. The world is full of injustice.

By the time we reached the opposite bank, I was groping for the elastic band around my wrist and trying to rake my hair into some kind of knot at the back of my head to obscure the fact that it now looked like a bale of tumbleweed had somehow managed to fix itself to my scalp. Catching a quite half-reflection of the two of us in a bus-stop shed, I saw with grateful relief that I had managed to look human one again, and noticed Ned put a hand to his hair, ruffle it a few times and watched it settle perfectly. I don’t get it.

“So what did you think of class?” He asked as we descended the bridge to the South Bank.

“Umm…I’m sure it will be interesting soon.” I said diplomatically.

“Marx not really your thing? Just up here…”

We walked past the entrance to the National Theatre and crossed the road to a little coffee shop set into an overpass.

“Not so much. I respect him and all, but…I don’t know. It’s just too—clinical? Does that make sense?”

He tilted his head and squinted at me. “Maybe—tell me more. After you tell me what you’re having.”

“Oh…coffee’s fine. Black, please.” Two textured cardboard cups were soon pushed across the counter in our direction and Ned scooped them up with practiced ease and carried them to a table outside.

“So—Marx?”

“Oh, right.” I sat, and wrapped my hands around the cup to keep them from doing anything stupid, and took a deep breath of the caffeinated steam billowing up around my face. “I don’t know. It’s just…I have a hard time with people who think they can define human behavior. I think you were completely right to say that his stuff is just a hypothesis, but…it’s still so—formulaic….I don’t know.”

“You don’t think humans are predictable and definable?”

I grinned at the table. “I think individuals are ridiculously predictable. Or at least under most circumstances.” It had taken years to figure out, but everyone has something that makes them tick, and if you can find it, you can figure them out, at least on a basic level. It did, however, require a massive amount of energy to remember each person’s individual quirks and tailor my behavior around them. Which is one of the main reasons I hate crowds and am so terrible about meeting new people. I needed to get him to do some more talking if this little exchange had any hopes of survival.

“But….” He tilted his head again, “but more than irrational, people are selfish. They’re not going to consider their place in the Proletariat if they are starving. Don’t get me wrong, there are those who will. But there’s a reason that they get into history books. They’re few and far between.”

“Very high opinion of your species there, Miss Philby.” He grinned.

I shrugged. “I don’t think it makes any sense to put the essential element of historic study on a pedestal. If you’re going to study humans, you need to accept the fact that they are lazy and selfish and messy and generally do a lot of ugly and unpredictable things, or you’re going to get very jaded very quickly.”

I looked up. He was still smiling, but he had this look of confused amusement in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite know what to make of me yet. But he seemed to be enjoying himself, I thought, with a renewed sense of belief.

“So what is it that you study, specifically?” He asked before I could frame a question to force him to talk.

“Me? First World War.”

He snickered into his cup. “Doesn’t get much messier or uglier than that.”

“But it’s a prime example of my point. People under pressure don’t always react the way you assume they will. And very often, it’s those people who determine the way the story ends, not the people who toed the line.” I bit my lip, knowing I was tottering on the precipice. If the conversation wanders anywhere close to the First World War, and I become very seriously verbally incontinent. “But what about you?”

“Hmmm?”

“What are you studying?” It was an awkward transition, but my jaw was starting to hurt.

“History of literature.”

“You already said that.” Stellar, Philby. “Anything more specific?”

He gave me that look again. “I think I’m going to be working on the history of writing about battle-stress….if that makes any sense.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well,” set his cup down and leaned forward, settling his elbows on his knees and looking over at me through his eyelashes. “I was thinking of looking at the way people with battle-stress—shell-shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, whatever you want to call it—the way they write about their experience and how their mental state affects their writing.”

I unabashedly gaped. “That…sounds incredible.”

He blinked. “Really?”

“My undergraduate work was on shell-shock, actually, so—yeah.” He beamed. “What books are you looking at?” I put my hands back around the cup and told myself to sit still.

“Well, I was thinking of Tim O’Brien’s stuff, like The Things They Carried, and maybe Catch-22 or some of the Russian stuff from World War Two, and for the First World War,” he looked up at me to gauge my reactions, “I was thinking of doing Barnaby Rutledge.”

My heart flipped over. “Who?”

He burst out laughing. Even though I knew it was at me, it was a pretty nice sound. “Don’t worry—nobody’s ever heard of him.”

“So who was he?”

“He wrote these really, really messed up stories that were supposedly autobiographical, but I doubt that. They were published either privately or in really small numbers, but he had quite a devoted following up until the Second World War.” He took a final sip of coffee and set the cup down beside him. “So far as I know, there’s only been one article written about him since, like, the ‘60’s, but a few of his stories are still being printed in anthologies, so I figured it was time someone looked at him again.”

“That’s—that’s amazing.” I said, equally fascinated and annoyed that I hadn’t heard of this guy.

“I can bring one of his stories with me to class next week, if you like.”

“Really? “ My voice did some kind of squeaky thing that was far from pleasant in my ears. “I’d love it.” I tried, a little more sedately.

Ned chuckled. “Alright then. As long as you promise to tell me what you think.”

I risked a smile back. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“Excellent.” He rubbed his hands together and looked at his watch. “Not that I’m not enjoying your company, but did you say you needed to be at work at two?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s ten to now.”

“Oh. Oh!” I stood up and slid my bag over my head. “Thanks for that.”

He stood up as well. Awkward, awkward, awkward…. “This was really nice.” I said, surprised at how genuine I sounded.

“It was,” he quirked a little grin. “We’ll have to do it again. Soon.”

“I’d like that.”

And I realized that I would.

The Devil's Trill

The building which Mitch and I mutually inhabit was built before the Second World War, and, not surprisingly, sustained a fair amount of structural damage during the Blitz. According to the man in the poorly-fitting suit who came to assess the property before the actual owners left said that the building was ‘bowed’, basically meaning that the two halves are slumped together and holding each other up. It’s a fairly common condition, especially in Stoke Newington, part of which got blasted out of existence one autumn evening. It will be a bitch if anyone ever decides to knock down any of the houses on the street, as the general opinion is that when one goes, quite literally, so goes the neighborhood, and if one house is removed, the whole thing will cave in like massive mortar dominoes.

The less-dramatic meaning of all of this is that there are places in our building where the walls are very thin. Not so much so that you can hear the other person making a cup of tea, but with a little effort, your neighbor can hear you. So it was probably a good thing that Mitch and I were both single, I guess. But it also explains why he felt the need to call when he was practicing. The first time he started tuning his violin when I’d first moved in, I thought the walls had mice and was ready to turn around and move back out.

That morning, however, I wish mice were the worst of my problems. I was up, had managed to open the window, run to the other side of the bedroom to turn on the lights, and was halfway down the first flight of stairs before I realized that I was awake and that Mitch was at it again (for the record, I have no idea why I thought opening the window would help. Very little that I do when startles awake makes any long-term rational sense). Since I was halfway there already, I clumped down to the kitchen, grabbed the phone off the wall and pounded Mitch’s number with a great display of excessive force.

I could hear the phone chirping on the other side of the wall, and its echo in my ear six times before he picked up.

“Umm…hello?”

“What the fuck are you playing?”

“Oh! Do you like it?”

“It sound like you are dueling with imps from the deepest pits of hell. What is it?”

“It’s a new Kreisler piece,” he said, sounding a little deflated.

“You do know that it’s not even seven, right?”

“Umm…”

“Mitch, in the name of Stephen King and all that is holy, I beg you to never, ever play that in the morning ever, ever again. Ok?”

“Umm….ok. Are you awake?”

“I am now, you evil man!”

“Oh. Good. Well, put on the kettle.”

And he hung up.

And it’s impossible to be angry with Mitchell for long. He’s just doesn’t have the kind of intellect that could be intentionally cruel or hurtful. If I can fault him for anything, it’s simply of not thinking all that frequently, but if that’s the worst I have to put up with, I think I’ve got it pretty good.

I heard the bang of the broomstick while I was pouring water over two teabags and presently, the cellar door opened, wafting the smell of toast through the house. Mitch’s hair led the rest of him into the kitchen. I don’t know what he had or hadn’t done with it in the past two days, but it looked like a lazy cartoonist had taken a black marker and scribbled it into place. He had stubble on his milky-pale skin and Panic at the Disco shirt on over his sweatpants.

“Is that mine?” I asked, nodding at the shirt.

“Maybe. It was in the dryer.”

“Fair enough.” He clattered the plate down on the table and wrapped both hands around the mug of tea, breathing in the caffeinated steam with near-religious zeal.

“So what the hell was that thing?”

“What—the piece?”

“Unless you really were torturing demons over there.”

He grinned and sucked a toast crumb off his thumb. “I found it at the British Library the other day. You know they have music manuscripts there?”

I nodded.

“Oh. So anyways, there’s this piece called “The Devil’s Trill”, and what he did was—“

“It’s called the what?”

“’The Devil’s Trill’,” he sighed and ran a hand through the riot of hair near his forehead. “Ok, so it was originally written by this chap Tartini in seventeen-whenever. He had this dream that the Devil came to him and asked him to be his servant. And in order to test him, Tartini hands the Devil his violin and he goes to town. And when he wakes up, Tartini tries to write down what he heard and, of course, fails utterly. Though the piece is an absolute monster to even try to play.” He leaned across the table and wiggled his eyebrows. “It’s said that whoever plays owes Satan their soul ever afterwards.”

“Charming.”

“Anyways, so it’s a nifty little thing. And time goes on, la la la. And then Kreisler joins the army during the First World War—you know this part, don’t you?”

“I knew he was in the Army for—what, like two months or something? I have his book about it around here somewhere…”

“Yes, yes, well, I found this letter by him that talked about this utter nut-job he met during his army career. The guy was British and they met at a hospital or who-knows-what. The point is, according to Kreisler, this British chap was the greatest musician he’d ever met. Ever. Said he’d never believed in diabolical talent ‘til he met this guy. So he arranges the Tartini piece for this chappie, and adds a movement. That’s what that was,” he flipped his head back, as if the sound were still resonating through the walls.” And sends it to this chappie’s address in London, but never heard word one from him ever again.”

“So how did it end up at the British Library?”

“Damned if I know. But you haven’t heard the best part yet.” He dropped his crust back onto the plate and it made a little ceramic ping. “This chappie’s name? Was Lucifer.”

“What?”

“Honest to God, I swear it. That’s why Kreisler went on and on about devils and demons—and that’s why he picked that piece to arrange for this British guy.”

“That’s…that’s just weird.”

“I know! Isn’t it great?”

“I don’t know about that…who names their kid Lucifer?”

Mitch shrugged. “I didn’t copy the letter. I was too busy trying to get all the notes down. But he said that he’s never seen elegant hands or such dark eyes in a human head.”

“Weird.”

Mitch grinned. “It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever seen.” He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a battered photocopy of some sheet music. The thing was, indeed, a riot of notes. Looking at it, I could follow the part I had heard Mitch play. Judging by the amount of ‘vibrato’ signs above the notes, the whole thing must sound like someone sobbing—or screaming.

“How can you play this with one violin? There are...these are four-note chords.”

I looked up and he was giving me the most manic grin I’d ever seen. “I have absolutely no idea. But I’m sure the Prince of Darkness will give me the aid I require.”

“Oh please, spare me.” I said, and swiped the last piece of toast. “With your luck, you’d get the ghost of some off-kilter First World War soldier with black eyes and skeletally beautiful hands menacing you in your sleep.”

“You are absolutely sick, you know that?”

I grinned back. “I have class this morning and work tonight. You off all day?”

He nodded and stretched in the chair, tilting it back until the headrest met the edge of the sink. “I love Mondays.”

“Bite me.” And I started sweeping the dishes and mugs into the dishwasher.