Night had just begun to fall, and the last train pulled away from the station into the distance of dark trees. From the other side of the street, across from the open platform, Ficino, a middle aged man of middle height with thin, brown hair and blue eyes, watched the lights get smaller, recede, and disappear. The heavy sound of the train against the tracks hung in the air like a flare and faded, faded, and was cut by blows from the horn, until all that could be heard was the backward rushing of the trees in the soft wind. So he would not be going home tonight.
Ficino stood there for a moment, feeling the weight of his black duffel bag on his shoulder. The wind descended slightly from the treetops and pushed his hair sharply across his head, like fine silica being blown across a smooth desert. To his left lay the small town in which he had just spent several days giving talks at the university on the subject—ostensibly from a philological position—of insurgency (L. insurgentum: Obs. Fr. insurger, “to rise in opposition,” etc.), and to his right lay a street, just a street, with houses lining it, that disappeared into the distance like the train had, but differently, for the street did not move, but disappeared somehow nonetheless.
There was a cafe built snuggly into the station, across the street from where Ficino stood. It was like the back part of a cathedral, low, with a circling glass rooftop (the chancel and ambulatory—the part of the structure that had to do with passengers and ticketing would have been like the nave and the transept). Through the cafe’s dim, warmly lit windows, he could see the glittering colors of glass bottles, a white scythe of reflection on a coffee pot, its red switch glowing, and the warped, partial reflections of the houses behind him. The sole waiter was outside, smoking in the red light of the railroad signals. Inside, the bartender leaned, taking sips from a white mug. Ficino crossed the street and went in, found a seat near the street-facing windows, slipped the big duffel bag discreetly into the space between the table legs and the low wall, and sat.
The waiter hurriedly put out his cigarette and trotted inside. Ficino ordered beer. The beer was brought, and Ficino tilted his chair back on two legs. The bitter, cold taste of it was tonic and vivifying. He drank it down and ordered another.
Still tilted back on two chair legs (to the backgrounded bartender’s intense consternation), Ficino marveled at the sweeping aspect of the cafe’s windows. It was a theater of fractured but smooth light and color, behaving like mercury. It was totally dark out now, and the stars shone down through the glass one by one, like far away, flickering candles, and the moon even showed itself via a reflection of a reflection, the geometry of which Ficino couldn’t easily trace, for he was facing west and the white hologram of its image hovered somewhere to the northwest.
Ficino drank, and soon he was thinking of his work, estimating how the talks had gone—this one had been listened to with the utmost attention, that one left his audience mumbling; a listener had been making notes on a pad, and so on—and then he remembered something that had happened on the second to last night. How had he not thought of it again since? Tipped far back on the legs of the chair, he went over the events, taking short, frequent sips of the golden beer, his blue eyes glazing over as they stared through the false star map of the cafe windows spread out before him.
Ficino had paused, not for effect, which was taking its natural course through a handful of listeners, but to quickly glance over the program of the next day’s lecture. He spoke again, breaking the light tension that had built from his conclusion (an etymological conclusion, cut and dry and fairly uninteresting actually, but that seemed to endorse the course of the word, his subject, its untroubled movement through lexical fields, that seemed to encourage its own untroubled meaning, happily separate from all fraught history below it, like a soft breath upon an ember, that winked sideways without irony but with gentleness, that played coy in all seriousness and said “This word stands.”)
“Tomorrow, we will leave the subject of insurgency and talk about operation. The title, as you can see—.”
He turned back to the crowd and noticed, standing beside the wide lecture hall doors, two men in blue flight suits. One was hopping up and down with hands in his pockets, like a kid who has to use the bathroom, and the other was taking notes on a legal pad on a clipboard. Ficino saw that they looked exactly the same, meaning that they looked like identical twins, except the one writing was wearing black-framed glasses and the one hopping around anxiously had noticeably blonder hair than the more serious-looking one.
“Same time tomorrow,” said Ficino, and gave a friendly wave to the people already standing from their seats. The doors opened. Ficino stacked his papers, read over a few lines, crossed some out in red ink and made fresh notes above them in blue. But he glanced up (not over the rim of a pair of glasses—don’t imagine it that way, just because he was a lecturer at a podium with some papers shuffling around in his hands, but remember, his eyes were blue and his sight was very good, so he had no need to go on peeking over the rim of a pair of glasses like a sniveling academic or old librarian, he just looked straight up with his whole head, guided by his eyes, which were wide open, unsquinting, etc., and his posture followed the lead of this look, so that when he looked, he looked with his whole body, as though with his chest, but also with his eyes, unmediated by glasses—one can’t stress that enough—he could see just fine) and looked at the two men in the blue flight suits, the one still writing, the other pacing left and right in an almost ridiculous manner, his arms swinging every which way.
Well, it seemed weird to Ficino, so he put his papers down (don’t imagine him taking his glasses off, like a pugilist taking off his gloves to fight dirty, because he didn’t even wear glasses, he didn’t need them, etc., and so you should see him as he was, shoulders squared and unhunched, clear-eyed, unbothered, nothing funny about him, hands relaxed in his pockets like a normal guy) and walked down into the pit of the lecture hall. But before he could even reach the aisles that led back up toward where the two men were standing, they froze, like two burglars caught in a spotlight, eyes as big as silver dollars, stared at Ficino walking up toward them, the lecturer’s head cocked slightly to one side in a friendly, approachable manner, and the men darted out of the door in a flurry of rustling notebook paper and swishing, flight suit, leg-on-leg running sounds.
An Aside on Ficino
It should be said that when Ficino paused, for example, in conversation or while giving a lecture, his ideas were not falling in on themselves, there was no recursive self-self dialogue/monologue going on within him, he was only pausing because the sentence he was in the middle of saying required it or because he had to take a breath or because someone interrupted him or some other thing. He did not double things inside himself into a tension that might later find undesirable expression. Nor did he go along in life like a sleepwalker. He was perfectly aware of himself, via everything around him, how he felt, his thoughts, and so on, but the friction between his mind and his soul was minimal. The input and output channels, so to speak, flowed normally, and he didn’t have the problem of crossing these channels, of rerouting his own output back into the input channel, muddling the flow of information, power, energy, feeling, perception, thought, intuition, understanding, apperception, construction, whatever. Ficino was a measured person. He drank the right amount of alcohol, inhaled the right amount of smoke from a reasonable number of cigarettes (which he never bought but always accepted from others, as though unburdening them of something, for he never asked for a cigarette; people offered them up to him regularly), ate good food and enjoyed all of it well. He didn’t wear or need glasses, no, as has been mentioned. And even though his brown hair was thin and it was possible that when he got older he might go bald, this never occurred to him as a problem. He was not a man who wore hats. His name was Italian, but he wasn’t particularly Italian looking. Whatever color suit you’re picturing that Ficino wore is correct, so long as that color is brown, the color of his hair. But often, he just wore black pants and a tucked collared shirt, black shoes, and sometimes a sweatshirt, even if it was warm outside that day.
Ensuing
Ficino went through the door behind the men, and by the time the doors swung shut behind him, they were already far down the hall, trotting shoulder to shoulder. Ficino broke into a light jog, and a smile appeared on his face. He wanted to call out Hey, stop! But he felt that that would be too much. Instead, he followed them. They turned down another hall. So did Ficino. They went into what they must have thought was another classroom, but which was actually a mop closet, came back out, looked around as Ficino, now at a quick walk, closed in on them, head still cocked at a friendly angle, his close-lipped smile fixed, and they kept trotting down the hall, stepping lightly as though they were trying to be very quiet and careful. They turned down yet another hall in the academic maze of halls, into the administrative wing of the university. Ficino had no trouble staying with them.
The floor there was carpeted and the three pairs of footsteps made no sound as they progressed. The two men passed by a glass window on their left that looked into a breakroom. Only a few lights were on. The coffee in the pot was low. A red dot glowed beside it. They went into a door on their right. A few moments beat past and Ficino entered too.
It was a lecture hall that looked identical to the one Ficino had just left behind, except the lights were off, it was dark, and instead of a blackboard with chalk taking up the center, there was a blank, white lit surface coming from a projector set up at the back of the room, by the entrance doors. The projector was on, but there were no slides to give the light form upon the also-white backdrop. A diffuse, cold light crept through the hall, illuminating very little.
At the top, half-circular step of the hall, Ficino stopped, let his eyes adjust (which they did quickly, without the aid of squinting or eye-rubbing), and saw the flight-suited men disappear behind the wall over which the empty white rectangle was projected. In all of the lecture rooms at the university, there were spaces behind these walls, making them look like minimized stage backdrops or out-of-place facades. Often, these spaces were used for storage or for improvised, secondary offices for underpaid faculty.
Ficino took a step down the aisle, then another. He paused and rubbed the back of his head, his eyes gazing blankly into the white rectangle. But he blinked, put his hands back in his pockets, and his smile returned as he continued downward toward the edge of the wall.
He looked behind, where the two men had disappeared. Everything was dark, except for a single cone of light deep in the indistinct back-area. He entered the room, or area, since there wasn’t a clearly defined door or threshold, and behind him the lecture hall receded until he was almost completely surrounded by darkness. The impression was one of a falsely infinite space, like being in a planetarium without stars. Ficino got closer and closer to the cone of light (a frozen comet in that untrue void). He could tell it was a desk lamp, but it wasn’t on a desk. It was on top of a tall, gray filing cabinet, which it partially illuminated.
When he stopped, it was because a man had stepped out of the shadows.
He was on the shorter side, wore a long, greasy-looking overcoat and a hat. He was smoking a long cigarette, blowing thick smoke (as though uninhaled) into the solitary light. Ficino’s eyes were fully adjusted now, and he could see the two flight-suited men standing a few feet back in the dark. The one still could not stand still, and the other held his writing pad out in front of his scrunched face.
The man began with an “I” and a pause, and then held forth, cigarette in hand, smoke whirling about his head, explaining in an oratory, dramatic style, never looking at Ficino, who stood there bewildered and almost amused with his hands at his sides, that his colleagues had been attending his, Ficino’s, lectures for the past week, and that they had taken notes on every one of them, thorough notes, exegetical, you could say, notes, and that these notes—the man pointed to the writing pad, hovering in his colleague’s hand in the dark behind him—had been gone over by none other than himself (he pointed at his rounded chest with the burning end of the cigarette) every night (here in this room? Ficino wondered, looking for a desk or a chair and not finding one), parsed through, duplicated, annotated, and filed away for further, later analysis or judgment, and he had to say, said the man, pausing for a puckering drag of the shortening cigarette, he wasn’t going to pretend that he understood everything of what Ficino was saying each night, that would indeed be pretense. But no matter, the man said, he understood enough. Oh yes, quite enough. The professor, said the man, was being investigated by the State Agency of—and here the man muttered a few incomprehensible syllables into his high coat collar—for domestic security reasons. Now, said the man, while I by no means feel the need to explain myself to you or to anyone else, I nevertheless would like to make something clear, namely that, as a detective for the—he muttered into his collar again—I must be, and am, highly tolerant toward differing viewpoints. Put plainly, I don’t care about your personal politics, nor for that matter your aesthetics, or your sexual proclivities, or what kind of toothpaste you use. I am what is called magnanimous toward perspectives that differ from my own—I can never let the contingency of a political opinion or nexus of opinions taint my work (he outspread his short arms) as an eminently (he spread them wide again) magnanimous detective. But, what my associates here have provided me with, the cut of the jib of your lectures, the gestalt, so to speak, of what we are here trying to prove that you are trying to say—well, it is beyond a doubt outside of any reasonable, well—what I mean to say is that I know what you’re up to. This, the concluding title of your series of talks, well, this to me, as well as my colleagues—the two men in the shadows nodded, one more vigorously than the other—is ridiculous, hyperbolic, unbelievable, but also mincing, dilettantish, effete—the detective sputtered for a moment and his mouth dropped open, his eyes grew three sizes but also somehow narrowed—accusingly? He gaped at Ficino and took a big, long breath of smoke, eyes still wide and yet narrow.
A Subversion
Ficino’s linear recollection of these events broke off with the finishing of his beer and the concurrent, as if magical reappearance of the waiter. Ficino ordered a coffee. It was brought to him in a white saucer. The coffee’s opaque surface rimmed by the white mug said that it was going to be a good-tasting cup of coffee, the strong kind brewed at night, served to customers on a technicality—for nobody orders coffee at night anymore; everybody is so worried that they’ll never get to sleep after a little coffee, as though the fabric of their life depended on not staying up only a little later, as if drinking a coffee late at night had ruined a previous generation’s, no, many previous generations’ bedtime, and that this was no longer morally acceptable, merely to have a coffee late in the evening—but only on a technicality was coffee sold to customers. Customers are not who the coffee is made for, which is why coffee late at night at a restaurant is always good, indeed, the best coffee one can buy, better than any morning coffee shop coffee because it is made for the crew in the back and the front of the restaurant to help them through the night. So the coffee has to be of high quality, brewed just right, hot, rich, highly drinkable, fragrant…
He thought about how the magnanimous detective and his two assistants, who, at the end of the detective’s little speech had sidled up next to him like unconvincing street thugs, had begun, as a troupe, so to speak, descending into gestures, gesticulations, pure hand-language, semi-obscene hand-signs, ghoulish faces, punkish flips of the chin and fingers, dallying paces, hops, sarcastic, caricaturish shrugs all the way up to the ears and down to the knees—the detective had doffed his hat in mock politeness and was bowing, his apprentices, or assistants rather, nodding, eyebrows reaching the invisible ceiling—and the scene had become so clownlike and bizarre that Ficino, no longer smiling but not at all threatened or cowed, inhaled the weird air of the back-room, taking in the scene one last time, an expressionistic imbroglio in the oblique lamplight, a George Grosz imitation, and turned and left.
At the top of the auditorium, he turned and saw that he had not been followed. The room was soundless, as if the trio had gone still like abandoned marionettes…
It was then, midway through the coffee, that a single train car pulled up on the hitherto empty tracks outside the cafe. The waiter was outside again in the red light smoking. The hologram of the moon had dissolved. The bartender ruffled his thick eyebrows, and Ficino thought that he looked like Brezhnev, and then, as a sort of comment to himself, that he liked this place, this town, the cafe, etc., and that he was even glad to have missed his train home—but then what was this train car doing that had just pulled up?
Two silhouetted heads were visible in the yellow-lit window. The door opened, but instead of a conductor or ticket-taker, the hatted head of the stout detective leaned out of the doorway but did not step out. He peered, squinting, across the street and looked left and right, as though checking for someone. Ficino sat very still, remaining unseen by the man who ducked back inside, satisfied, closing the door.
For a minute, nothing happened. Then, one of the assistants, the one with glasses, appeared through a hatch on the top of the traincar. He placed a small magnetic siren-light on the metal casing of the car. It rotated blue and red without a sound, and the engine of the traincar rumbled and rattled and the car began chugging back down the tracks in earnest, inscrutable pursuit of their escaped, suspect, highly suspect man…
An Arrest
The narrative, at this point, falls aside like the clumsily changing tracks of a rail line, for as was indicated in the very beginning, Ficino was supposed to be on the train that the traincar-unit ostensibly set off to follow in the name of an unknown charge: had things gone this way, there would surely be more to tell, and maybe we would see Ficino get off in the dark city wherein his small apartment lay, and it would be raining, and all manner of breaking and reforming colorlight would foray into his clear eyes, absorbed in his untroubled forehead, and all manner of seedy street-type characters would limp by Ficino and he would give them his measured face in acknowledgement as the rain lined them all, between the glassy, stoney buildings, everything would be vertical and blue-gray-red-green, highly unlike the little university town and its realistic, easy night cafe, and as he left the station and the city became darker and he neared a corner, he would turn, feeling no longer charmed by his coffee and beer, because he would not have had these on his trainride back, but feeling uneasy, and he would see the assistants walking toward him in their flight-suits, black now and serious, and the one would be gesticulating no longer but walking steadily alongside the other, wearing his glasses, with the magnanimous detective behind them drawn up to a strange height, a disarming height that he had not been in the back-room of the university auditorium, tall now, dictatorial, approaching, removing a gleaming pair of handcuffs from the small of his back, a black pistol showing itself, like a sleeping guard dog, hovering in his flapping jacket, in the rain still which fell hard.
Zane Perdue is from Albuquerque, NM. He lives in Philadelphia, PA, where he works at a bookstore. His writing has appeared with The Decadent Review, Bridge Eight Press, SORTES, SUBMIT / BarBar, The Hong Kong Review, and elsewhere: he also regularly writes for his Substack, COM-POSIT.
Punt Volat 