The Strange Case of Rachel K Read online

  Also by Rachel Kushner

  Telex from Cuba

  The Flamethrowers

  Contents

  Preface

  The Great Exception

  Debouchment

  The Strange Case of Rachel K

  Preface

  One day ten years ago I sat down and for approximately twenty hours read an enormous book on the history of so-called civilization, a work of seductive details (the Peruvians believed the world was a box with a ridged top, the Egyptians that it was an egg) and an Occidental outlook, critical of every religion and ideology except the dogma of progress itself. Its successive assertions—“People who could agree on few other facts about the remote regions of the earth somehow agreed on the geography of the afterworld” and “More appealing than knowledge itself was the feeling of knowing”—were like the galloping of horses to me. My heart beat with their hooves. I wanted to run alongside, but with my own version of discovery and progress. I did so, by writing “The Great Exception.”

  * * *

  “The Strange Case of Rachel K” was something else, the name of a Cuban film made in the early 1970s, during Cuba’s great revolutionary film renaissance (not documented in big books about world progress). I have never seen it. It is one filmmaker’s interpretation of a vague historical record concerning a real person named Rachel K, a 1930s courtesan found murdered in a hotel room. I followed an instinct to build my own interpretation of her, making the record less vague, more specific, and procuring for her, as foil, another real historical figure, Christian de la Mazière, whose dubious and fascinating personal history is recounted in Marcel Ophüls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity. I started from the presumption that Rachel K definitely would not die, at least not in the way prescribed by the lessons of history. You might notice that she shares my name; I did too. Writers who have rejected logic and science, those galloping horses, take a different path, through coincidence, the cunning of reason, and mystical signs pointing in the direction that is to be taken.

  * * *

  “Debouchment” was written under some kind of spell, when the soldiers of the mind came out from their hidden posts, armed and unafraid, self-organized. If I could have written an entire book with the same density and pauses as that one short piece, I would have. Since I did not, this is what I have of its kind.

  LOS ANGELES, 2014

  THE GREAT EXCEPTION

  .

  1

  I don’t care that the earth’s shadow eclipses the moon, said the Admiral. I have seen terrific irregularity with mine own eyes, and have been forced to the sensible conclusion that this earth is not round as some wrongly insist, but the shape of a pear, or violin.

  A thousand years before the Admiral made his daring proclamation and charted his course on this violin-shaped earth, people thought it was flat like a discus. Until the Greek Cartographer spoke out, claiming it was round like an orange. He’d drawn standard aesthetic divisions on his planisphere, a flattened version of his round earth. The first set of lines he called “latitude.” And the second set, trickier than the first, “longitude.” But his finest moment, his greatest act of self-control, had been to leave parts of his map blank. The Cartographer was later forgotten, his maps lost like dreams that are lost upon waking, lingering only as faint unglimpsable residues. Seafarers, with no reliable guide by which to brave the open Ocean, paddled and were wind-scooted along in landlocked, salted waters. For navigation, they dead reckoned and used wind roses—radiating lines of sixteen focal points, ornate foliations that indicated air currents but varied according to the size and dimensions of the map, so that no two maps, even of one place, were ever alike. The Cartographer was eventually remembered, but by then the forgetting had been sustained so long that no one could read Greek. The epoch after the Cartographer’s planisphere reigned and before it reigned again—forgotten and then discovered but unreadable—was known as the Great Interruption. It lasted one thousand years.

  * * *

  Exploring is an undertaking of the brain. The pioneering Portuguese Navigator was one lonely man, thinking. His name was Henry. He wore a hair shirt. He died a virgin. The Portuguese, not waylaid like the rest of Europe by bloody wars, by the Hundred Years one and the other called Roses, were free to daydream. Their country faced the ocean, not the Sea-in-the-Midst-of-the-Land. This orientation gave them a taste for the formless and unfathomable, and Portuguese sailors went south toward Africa, the massive continent with friendly and also unfriendly inhabitants. But their polestar sank as they went, and so they rigged up a kind of crude latitude. They wagered on uncharted courses, and flung themselves into the Watery Unknown.

  With Henry’s sacrifices and his intuition there were advances. With each advance, the locating and charting of Places, the Pure Unknown was molested, and the mental bravery in revering Nothingness leaked away. Charting courses in the mind came before charting courses in the sea. The Great Exception (shortly after the Great Interruption) was the finding of the Americas, which happened on the earth before it happened in men’s minds.

  When the Admiral went to Her Highness to explain his astounding insight that the earth was shaped like a pear or violin, and to request the gold for his expedition, he was accidentally drunk from too much wine, and drunk as well on the heady vapors of hubris and conviction. Flushed and inspired, he got on his knee and spirited the story with more zing. He impromptu scrapped the violin thing and told Her Highness that the earth was the shape of a woman’s breast. He said the Breast had a protrusion at the Orient, where he wanted to sail, where the water grew warm and tumultuous. The nipple, he said, locking his onyx eyes to her green ones, tracing a breast in the air with his slim-fingered, Portuguese hands. Slim fingers he couldn’t resist adorning with the ring the Cardinal had given him for luck, with a cross so large and yellow diamonds so sharply cut, that he’d scratched himself with it more than once.

  “Pious excess” would be one way to classify the jewels the Cardinal preferred, to wear and to give to explorers before they set sail. It might have been that the Cardinal had hoped the Admiral would think of him, as he wore the enormous and pointy ring. But the Admiral had thought only of the Queen, or more specifically, the Queen’s breast, which he’d all but touched, tracing its curve and pretending to trace the earth’s curve. But that had only been a moment. An instrumental moment. The Admiral did not think in the manner that either the Queen or the Cardinal or most people did, of bodies and of desire. He was driven by entirely different impulses, which is why he was an explorer.

  With Royal approval, the Admiral set sail toward the Breast’s dark and uncharted areola, where the waters grew warm and tumultuous. Never mind the astrolabe, the sextant, the compass or the precious lodestone the Admiral guarded to remagnetize the compass, should it weaken. He navigated most faithfully by a special form of reasoning, by which the world—possibly unmappable—conformed to the Admiral’s mental map of a well-shaped Breast. The places he encountered turned out to have been just the places he meant to have encountered. Such as the absurdly large slab of land that appeared at the Breast’s protrusion, before he reached the Orient. A crenulated green continent with volcanic lakes and snow-capped mountains. En route to the green crenulated slab, he floated toward a smallish and exquisite island the shape of a sardine or eyebrow, with riotous colors and flowering trees, humid and fresh. He anchored in one of its eastern harbors, whose shore was paved with pulverized white diamonds. Beyond the white diamond shore was a thick curtain of monochrome green vines. The Admiral parted the vines and called out, “Hello?”

  He named the place Kuba, which is what the natives—who appeared to greet him from beyond the green jungle drapery—said it
was called. And what the Germans, fond of the letter K, still call it. The Admiral napped in a hammock strung between a palm and a paw-paw, tired after such a long journey, lulled by the syncopated crash of waves and the sultry and healthful air, happy in his own genius and exactly where he wanted to be. True beauty and the unknown are alike, in having no precedents. You recognize them when you see them, if you have such a gift of seeing. Numeric calculations are no match for life’s unrest. Far superior is knowing the world is a pear, a violin, a breast. By such poetic and razor precision, the Admiral mapped an unmappable world.

  2

  They cooked his toes separate from the rest of the stew. With the toes severed from the feet, the Admiral could not tromp inland and subjugate the island. He couldn’t tromp inland anyhow, because they’d punctured his body with arrows dipped in deadly manchineel sap. When the natives attacked, the Admiral had instinctively pulled out his shaving mirror and reflected sunlight at them. But the natives were not as crude as the Admiral had suspected. They’d known how to make mirrors since the Neolithic age, with self-polishing obsidian. The Admiral was wading through a sulfuric bog, trying to run away, when they ambushed him. Soon after, his body simmered over a fire of mangrove charcoal, in a soup that bubbled and steamed. They weren’t driven to eat him out of hunger—this was the Tropics, bountiful with sea animals and wild fruits, and the living was easy. When the meat was tender, the Tribe Taster had a bite. He said, in a language now lost, that the Admiral tasted like rubber bands. Two men and a boy dumped the enormous pot on its side and bones and meat and broth sluiced onto the red clay earth. They carefully extinguished the fire and vacated their cooksite. What was dumped from the pot, leftovers spoiling and reheating in the sunlight, was eaten by wild pigs. The French Poet, who came later in this history, believed that noxious animals were the embodiment of man’s evil thoughts. This man’s evil thoughts lapped him up, flesh, femur, and marinade.

  The Queen was anxious for the Admiral’s return. Not only for the feedback, which meant bounty from the exploration, in a time when this imperialist meaning was the only meaning the term “feedback” had, but to satisfy her desire. The pomp and expense of the Admiral’s voyage to the Orient had seemed a kind of elaborate foreplay between the two of them. In circling the earth the Admiral was circling her breast with his slim, Portuguese fingers. And the circling of the breast was only a prologue to other, more irreversible acts. Meanwhile, the Cardinal had forgotten all about the Admiral, preoccupied with other jewelry, sharper and more elaborate, for other dandies, braver and more attentive than the Admiral had been, who never even thanked the Cardinal for his yellow diamond ring.

  The Queen was washed-over with desire, remembering the Admiral’s shining black eyes, his broom-heavy lashes sweeping down and then up again as he’d requested the gold. The Admiral had put his head in her lap after he told her, passionately, of the earth’s true shape. She’d resisted the urge to push his face into the bunting and toile of her skirt. She thought of him and squeezed her legs together. The King asked her what she was doing and she said nothing. For days on end she crossed her legs and squeezed them tight, thinking of that moment, the Admiral’s face resting in her lap, wishing she’d pushed him toward her, into the layers of toile and gauze and bunting. He would have capitulated, she knew. Anything for the voyage.

  But all that was left of the Admiral was the yellow diamond ring. Like most gifts in the history of gift giving, objects whose meanings are lost on recipients, the ring had gone straight to the Symbolic Junkyard of Forsaken Gifts. The Cardinal had looked at the Admiral and the Admiral had looked at his map. Now, the ring’s yellow diamonds coruscated in the thick, tropical light, tied to a string dangling from the end of a pole.

  Her Highness received his first letter from the island weeks after the Admiral died, his toes cooked separate from the rest of the meal the natives discarded. The Admiral, having understood that all elements of discovery had a price tag and would save his reputation and ensure the financing of future expeditions, had marketed the place like a twenty-dollar whore. Everything was usable, sellable, smeltable, shippable, eatable, drinkable, smokable, wearable. He even claimed that the flocks of cantankerous parrots blotting out the blue of the sky were the tastiest flesh he’d ever sunk his teeth into. He yanked out their iridescent feathers and sawed off their emerald green wings, and cooked them unseasoned over a smoky fire just to prove his point. There wasn’t much meat on a parrot, and the flesh was slightly bitter. “Armpit acidic” is how the Tribe Taster would have described its flavor, before he and his tribe were annihilated. Nonetheless, parrot eating was later considered the utmost in sophistication among the Spanish who built their colonial courts on the hills above the white lagoons. The aristocrats trained the parrots to hurl insults at them, and thereby a grand pantomime of insult and injury was played out, a kind of dinner theater. Parricide is murdering someone to whom you owe reverence. This was not parricide. The birds, to whom the Spanish owed nothing, spoke profanely and deserved to be punished, and their death elevated the vulgar ceremony of eating to the noble proceedings of justice.

  The purest of maps is the treasure map—the essence of cartography, its ethanol. With the riches of this unexpected island mapped out, the Queen sent expedition after expedition, consoling herself by neutralizing the Admiral’s memory as one name lost in a long list of explorers who curried her favor and went East. Or West, as it turned out. But the riches that scended over the waves of the Dark Ocean arrived on the Dark Continent with an unintended gift from beyond the green jungle drapery: syphilis. The Queen was its first mainland victim, but she spread it amply before expiring. In Second Empire Paris, where it was rampant, they called this disease “flâneur’s curiosity.” But it wasn’t simply a disease, a tropical so-called malady. It was phantom testimony of the Europeans’ taste for suffering, infection and luxury. The Second Empire Poet, in his rose gloves and bloody cravat, said the man unthirsty for the consolations of pockmarked, disease-ridden women was a harp with no bass string. This was a later era, when the taste for luxury, suffering and infection was better understood. The Poet himself loved pockmarked women. “I feel sorry,” he said, “for the man who does not.”

  3

  Goodbye tropical traveler! they called, waving. It was a small crowd that had accompanied her to the Lake City train platform. She lifted up her petticoats and stepped onto the scuff grate. She was light. It was the gown that was heavy. Flounces with three hundred dollars worth of gold coins sewn into the hems, like the jeweled bridal corset of a Romanov heiress. Her name was light as well: Aloha Oe. Like a shrimp chip, a tuft of cloud-pink cotton candy. A word that meant hello, and also goodbye. The people on the platform waved goodbye as the train rolled slowly east.

  The idea was born in the tractor beam of a Kinetoscope, a cylinder of dusty light that splashed onto a linen screen at Lake City’s newly built Palace of Moving Actualities, one of only three in the entire state of Colorado. Aloha saw bleached flickering images of the streets of Havana: black shadows on a white wall and men in rumpled duck suits and Panama hats. Then Theodore Roosevelt posing for the camera before he turned to charge up a hill. The film cut to natives working for the United Fruit Company, chomping on fibrous sugar cane and putting chilled custard apples in what seemed to be their underwear. To cool themselves while they worked, was Aloha’s educated guess. She’d seen the painted transparencies of stereorama, panorama, zoopraxiscope—hardly wonders compared with the dusty, marvelous light splashing on the linen screen. It was like watching her own dreams. As if she’d dreamed about the Spanish losing the war and this dank paradise opening, the new version of the Western frontier. The distance between her and the palm shadows on a white wall, the giant stalks of bananas violently hacked from the trees and thudding to the earth, the men putting chilled custard apples in their underwear, was the distance between a place on a map and a slab of actual land, surrounded by a foamed crepe of waves. Or wood and wood grain alcohol. Things that w
ere vastly different and yet linked. The light splashing on the screen, almost a déjà vu, tricked her into getting on a train, then another train, then a boat that floated the bluish­ purple gulf stream to the Caribbean.

  As she stepped off the gangplank, high above the garbage­-strewn harbor, her skirts tugged at her like she was wading into waist-deep water with her clothes on. The weight of the coins made it hard to walk, but it was better than gilding her teeth and pulling them out one by one with pliers like a traveling Roma. She wandered the greasy cobblestone streets amidst strange faces, humidity, sewage and factory smoke. It began pouring rain, as if all the moisture in the air had been leading to something, a necessary release. When the rain stopped, clouds wheeled out like theatre sets being replaced for the next act. Sun flooded in, virile and bright. She bought a glass of cane juice and sat on the cement benches of the Prado, under the causarina trees. Surrender yourself to the heat, she thought, her heavy skirts pulling, her dress sweat-soaked and plastered to her body. Women paraded by, their faces painted to resemble polished taffeta, streaks of creme blush glowing on their cheeks, their hair lacquered and coiled like ribbon candy into magnificent looped piles. She was watching them, these probably-prostitutes, and didn’t notice the young man walking toward her, carrying a leather valise. She looked up and there he was, blue eyes that were not an innocent infant’s blue, but dark as cobalt, like a shadow was passing over his face. May I sit here? he asked in a faint accent, from where she didn’t know.

  That’s how it had started, she would later remember, when it was too late to say no, or that she was just leaving. He was too likable, too handsome, but attraction fused with trouble is a complex molecule, containing magnetic parts tempting her to find out just what kind of trouble. That she went to his rooming quarters unchaperoned didn’t matter. That he made actualities that were really fictions didn’t matter either—what could survive such a radical transition, from the vast unknowable world to a contained column of flickering light hitting a wall? He’d filmed the sinking of a Spanish armada in Santiago Bay. His footage was a puppet show, photographs of ships glued to paste board. The stage was his bathtub, with grains of turquoise-blue vegetable dye sifted into the water. The explosions, thimbles of gunpowder on little wooden blocks, which he detonated with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. For smoke, he blew cigar exhalations into the frame.