The Metropolis Case Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Matthew Gallaway

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Translation of the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde used with kind permission of Christopher Bergen.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gallaway, Matthew.

  The Metropolis case : a novel / Matthew Gallaway. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Opera—Fiction. 2. Immortality—Fiction. 3. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883. Tristan und Isolde—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607 A415515M48 2010

  813′.6—dc22 2010013576

  eISBN: 978-0-307-46344-9

  v3.1

  FOR STEPHEN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Act: Contingency

  Chapter 1: The Tristan Chord

  Chapter 2: Through Its Street Names, the City Is a Mystic Cosmos

  Chapter 3: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

  Chapter 4: Il n’existe pas deux genres de poésies; il n’en est qu’une

  Chapter 5: The Marble Index

  Chapter 6: The Apology of Socrates

  Chapter 7: Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To

  Chapter 8: The Diary of One Who Disappeared

  Chapter 9: Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide

  Chapter 10: Rembrandt Pussyhorse

  Chapter 11: Meine Musikdramatische Idee

  Chapter 12: Kritik der reinen Vernunft

  Chapter 13: Spiderland

  Chapter 14: The Experience of Our Generation: That Capitalism will Not Die a Natural Death

  Chapter 15: A Kind of History of My Life

  Chapter 16: Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville

  Second Act: Irony

  Chapter 17: Dial M for Motherfucker

  Chapter 18: The Psychology of the Transference

  Chapter 19: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical

  Chapter 20: A Section That May Be Skipped by Anyone Not Particularly Impressed by Thinking as an Occupation

  Chapter 21: The Past Unfolds in the Wax Museum like Distance in the Domestic Interior

  Chapter 22: Original Stories from Real Life

  Chapter 23: Loveless

  Chapter 24: The Motion of Light in Water

  Chapter 25: The World as Will and Representation

  Chapter 26: What Fun Life Was

  Chapter 27: The City as a Landscape and as a Room

  Chapter 28: The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken

  Chapter 29: Blue Monday

  Chapter 30: Ce Livre pourrait s’appeler Les enfants de Marx et de Coca-Cola

  Chapter 31: The Intermittences of the Heart

  Chapter 32: Do You Want Chillwave or Do You Want the Truth?

  Chapter 33: This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother

  Chapter 34: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)

  Third Act: Solidarity

  Chapter 35: We have to Wake Up from the Existence of Our Parents: In This Awakening, We Must Give an Account of the Nearness of That Existence

  Chapter 36: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

  Chapter 37: The World Is the Totality of Facts, Not of Things

  Chapter 38: The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths

  Chapter 39: On Fire

  Chapter 40: Fashion Is a Canon for This Dialectic Also

  Chapter 41: Cocksucker Blues

  Chapter 42: Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

  Chapter 43: In Distortion-Free Mirrors

  Chapter 44: La vraie douleur est incompatible avec l’espoir

  Chapter 45: There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  The Tristan Chord

  NEW YORK CITY, 2003 (via e-mail)

  S—news!—your elder brother has procured four tickets to the opera on the Saturday night of your visit next month AND invitations to the after-party at Demoiselles, an old and rather exquisite French restaurant not far from Lincoln Center. There will be champagne; there WILL be chocolate soufflés. (Obviously M had a big hand in making this happen: you’ll be able to thank HER in person.) We’re seeing Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner, which means I should fill you in on a few things starting now, to prepare you. You’ll be happy to note (as I read somewhere, or possibly imagined) that certain listeners who attended the opera’s premiere 130-something years ago did in fact GO INSANE and were shipped off to asylums in the Bavarian Alps with a diagnosis of “Tristania.” I can hear you muttering “apocryphal” in your Ph.D. voice, and while I’m not inclined to disagree, insanity IS perhaps an understandable reaction if we put ourselves in the shoes of 19th-century listeners (always an interesting exercise at the opera, or at least the old ones) and consider the unprecedented volume of the orchestra (one of the largest ever assembled) combined with a complete absence of recorded sound to that point in history—i.e., NO WALKMEN?!—and an equally unprecedented musical dissonance (except for perhaps a few “tone poems” by the supremely gorgeous and talented Franz Liszt—who by the way was Wagner’s father-in-law and whom he shamelessly ripped off both financially and artistically, in the way things were done back then)—I DIGRESS.

  First the easy stuff: on its most superficial level, Tristan and Isolde is about an affair—surprise!—between T and I that unfolds as she’s about to be married to his uncle (“uh-oh” is right), after which scandal and tragedy ensue, THE END. What’s more interesting is that their love, in addition to being illicit, is very much entwined with an unceasing torment and longing (represented by “the day” or more broadly “life”), not just for each other but for a more permanent form of relief (otherwise known as “the night” or “death”). BEAR WITH ME—IT’S NOT AS DEPRESSING AS IT SOUNDS! Or even if it is, it doesn’t matter because the music—despite possessing very little that might be considered a “tune”—is lush and restless and revolutionary to the extent that, like so many great works of art (leaving aside the question of exactly which ones), it encapsulates much of what came before and predicts much of what followed. Or to put it in more musico-historical terms (whatever, I know it’s not a word), it’s essentially—and perhaps shockingly, for those of us who get excited to find traces of ourselves in such things—“modern” for its failure to ever quite resolve, or at least until the very end, by which point—if it’s a good performance, which I expect given the parties involved—you’ll be reduced to a spoonful of quivering jelly. The piece is in a state of constant flux, with one atonal chord giving way to the next and then to the next and so on and so on and so on, like you’re listening to the aural equivalent of one of those time-lapse photography projects of an endlessly mutating landscape. My own theory (by which I mean I may or may not have also read this somewhere) is that Tristan contains the seeds of modern “abstraction” and “psychology” that ultimately defined so much of the twentieth century, i.e., it’s no accident that in the wake of Tristan (1865) you have impressionism (Elstir!), cubism, Duchamp (specifically Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2), Freud and Jung and V. Woolf
and Einstein (that’s for you, Professor Vallence), and eventually, I don’t know, the Smiths? (Hey, I never claimed to be an academic!)

  Which is not to say Tristan will hammer you over the head—for most “contemporary” (such a horrible word, ruined by furniture catalogs and bad radio stations) listeners, it’s a more subtle form of annihilation. (Speaking of which, I ordered you a copy: listen to it, ideally more than once—SEE ABOVE, REGARDING RISK OF INSANITY.) Take note of the instrumental section at the beginning (the famous first-act prelude), the quiet call-and-response of the cellos and winds, the pizzicato burst of strings that will (after you’ve acclimated) strangely dictate the beat of your heart to match the languid tempo of the piece. And once you’ve listened a few times, I guarantee the music will start to “infect” you (but in a good way), so that—if you’ll allow me to play “rock critic” for a few seconds—you’ll start to hear Tristan echoed everywhere, in the beautiful, angry chaos of our beloved Velvet Underground, in the ethereal, tremulant white noise of My Bloody Valentine, or even—and perhaps more to the point, given where you’ll be staying—in the endless tides of traffic moving into and out of Manhattan along the West Side Highway, five hundred feet below my balcony in Washington Heights. You should also note that however “difficult” it may be for listeners to digest, it’s even MORE dangerous to sing; Tristan is the super-double marathon of operas, and its history, like that of Mt. Everest, is littered with the corpses (both literal and figurative) of those singers who made the mistake of attempting it too early in their careers, or lacked the proper training, didn’t have the right kind of voice, or—saddest of all—simply expired under the weight of so much dissonant longing.

  In practical terms, what all of this means is that you and C should absolutely, positively resist the temptation to plan anything on Saturday afternoon that doesn’t involve napping, or at most lounging, because curtain is at 7:00 p.m., the opera is five hours long (I KNOW), and dinner won’t be served until 1:00 a.m. or thereabouts. (I’ve learned that most denizens of the opera house, like those of the seediest East Village punk-rock venues, are truly nocturnal, which perhaps explains some of my affinity for both?) Plan to wear whatever you’d like as long as it’s “fabulous” (I offer in a half-ironic tone), but there’s really no such thing as overdressing for the opera—especially on opening night—so when in doubt, DO NOT HOLD BACK. (By the way, I’m also imposing a similar regimen on P, who is equally uninitiated and who will be joining us as MY date.) So brace yourself, little S, it’s going to be an evening you won’t forget too soon; the curtain will rise to lead us to new lands from which we—like so many before us—will return both destroyed and cleansed, knowing we’ll never be the same! xoxo M

  2

  Through Its Street Names, the City Is a Mystic Cosmos

  NEW YORK CITY, 1960. Anna Prus stepped out of her apartment building onto Seventy-fourth Street, where she paused to glance back at Central Park, which looked opaque and grainy like an old newsreel. It had been snowing for days, but a sallow, expectant glow emanating from the crenellated perimeter of the park told her the storm was nearing an end. While she did not relish the idea of negotiating a trip downtown, the transformation of the city into a tundra, with squalls of powder and amorphous mounds where there had once been cars, mailboxes, and shrubs, struck her as the perfect accompaniment to the magic, improbable turn the day had taken, now that she was about to make her Isolde debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

  Though Anna was not an unknown, she had to this point in her career been relegated to smaller houses and (except for some minor roles) hired by the Met as an alternate to the type of leading soprano she had always wanted to be. But as sometimes happened with singers her age—Anna was forty—her voice, after six years at the conservatory and over fifteen more of training, auditioning, and performing, had at last blossomed, giving her reason to believe that she had found her calling in the Wagnerian repertory. Which is not to say her future had been unfurled like a red carpet; if anything, her reputation as a dependable but hardly breathtaking talent still preceded her, and for this current production, she had been brought in only to “cover” the Isolde and so had expected—as she had always done in the past—to spend her nights in the wings, anxiously hoping and not hoping (because she was not one to wish ill health or misfortune on anyone) that she would finally get her chance.

  This time her luck was better; from the start, the lead struggled with the role and after much gossip and speculation had finally canceled, which meant Anna was going on tonight and possibly for the entire run if she could deliver the type of performance the Met general manager, Rudolf Bing (having made a point of attending one of her cover rehearsals in the event of just this contingency), expected of her. Anna buried her scarf-wrapped chin deep into the neck of her fur coat and wrapped her arms around her bag, which held a carefully folded dress, shoes, and jewelry for the opening-night party scheduled for after the show. She walked forward into the wind, nimbly tracing a line through a group of men digging out with picks and shovels, and forced herself to review a mental list of exactly what she needed to attend to—wig, costume, makeup, voice—and whom she needed to see at the theater—Mr. Bing, the maestro, the director, the Tristan—before her seven o’clock curtain.

  Reaching the corner at Broadway, she stopped to catch her breath before she skipped off the curb toward a small island of pavement with a thought to hail a cab, but with her vision obscured by the heaps of snow, she managed to jump—and this she realized with a gasp as the ground rumbled beneath her—directly in front of a massive truck. If time did not entirely stop for Anna, it slowed, just as she had always expected it would in the final seconds before her death. With no chance to escape forward or back, and still clutching her change of clothes, she raised her face to the sky: her blue eyes turned opalescent in a last glimmer of winter light and she begged her parents to help from the afterlife, to arrange with whatever power was responsible for this senseless calamity to delay it a little longer; even half a day would suffice.

  Whether as a result of this prayer or thanks to some deeper instinct, she felt something stir within her, something she had long trained herself to recognize but had never surrendered to with such abandon; possessed by her Isolde, she turned toward the truck and in the fraction of a second remaining unleashed her power: “Wer wagt mich zu höhnen [Who dares to mock me]?” she screamed, filling each note with the same vengeance that had marked her recent rehearsals. If no less aggrieved, she felt satisfied: the line had been delivered with a potent mix of force, indignation, and curiosity. Her mind grew quiet, even serene; any doubt about her ability to sing had been laid to rest. As she opened her eyes, the truck seemed to pass slowly through her, as if the sublime quality of her voice had momentarily turned her body to light.

  She looked past the surrounding snowcapped peaks at the looming apartment buildings, which seemed to sway in the deepening night, and as much as she longed to join this darkness and its promise of tranquillity, of belonging to nothing and everything all at once, she knew that it was not yet hers to take. She heard a thunderclap, and everything turned white. A moment later she found herself safely on the sidewalk, where she looked at the passing traffic and a few errant pedestrians, hunched over and seemingly concerned with nothing but managing their own treks through this temporary wilderness. Anna was not dead; time, she observed with gratitude and awe, had resumed its unsteady course. She placed a hand on a snowbank to confirm her return to a more familiar world, the same one—she remembered with a jolt—in which she was about to sing for thousands of other souls, each in its own way as desperate as her own.

  3

  Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

  NEW YORK CITY, 2001. Walking into Demoiselles, the French bistro on Fifty-fourth Street, Martin allowed his eyes to wander over the plush burgundy banquettes that curved into the distance and the folds of drapery that cascaded down from the caliginous heights. Though pleasantly full, the room was not overcrowded or fre
netic, like so many newer restaurants, and he savored the quiet but insistent clink of silver and crystal above the hushed conversations. He spotted his friend Jay at the bar, clutching a glass of what he knew would be a Highlands single malt not less than twenty years old, undiluted by water or ice. They had known each other since boarding school, and though a year had passed since their last meeting, a September birthday dinner was a tradition; Martin’s fell on the eleventh and Jay’s was the nineteenth: both were turning forty-one. They shook hands—a vestigial gesture of Martin’s past—before they embraced and returned to the bar. Martin ordered a drink and made a toast to their respective survival through four decades and a friendship that had endured more than half of this time, after which they spent a few minutes discussing Jay’s wife, a former opera singer who now sat on the board of Juilliard. Although Martin had grown up listening mostly to rock, in part thanks to Jay, he had become interested in opera, and he often wished that his job allowed him more time to attend performances.

  “So bring me up to speed, Vallence,” Jay said as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses to the bridge of his nose. “Seeing anyone I should know about?”

  Martin shook his head. “Nothing serious—work is still too crazy.”

  Jay responded with a bark that Martin recognized as a laugh. “Didn’t you say last year that you wanted to—and I quote—get a life?”

  Martin smiled and patted his not insubstantial paunch. “I also wanted to lose some of this.” At over six feet tall, with an often goateed, bearded, or at least five-o’clock-shadowed face and barely an inch of skin not covered in fur—and as much as he liked to avoid labels and the illusory “communities” so often associated with them—there was no getting around the fact that he was a “bear,” and possibly even a “daddy bear” now that he was safely into his forties. “I’ll get there,” he promised, “but there’s a ton of work at the firm right now—Internet stuff—‘start-ups,’ ” he said, making the quotation marks sign with his fingers.