Simon Magus

By Eric Berman

"I am Simon Magus the stitcher of past and future. I ply my trade where the tired, the old, the dispossessed of the world are wound on the great loom of Government. They come before me, their lives a tangled skein of memory. Mother and father, friends and loved ones have fallen by the way; the past has faded; the things that were left behind have moldered and are scattered. The mind of a son, a daughter sitting before me dims. The thread is lost. Oblivion."

So begins this extraordinary story of love and mystery, courage and despair set in the streets of New Orleans. Simon Magus is a bureaucrat, an expert in navigating the twists and turns of other peoples' lives. But now, falling into the emotional hell of his own failed marriage, torn by dreams of his lost children, he reaches out to beauty and love to save himself, and he is drawn into a world he cannot control, into the slow motion agony of drugs: this is the world laid bare by Simon Magus. This is the world of his redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 23, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469701004

Eric Berman

Eric Berman worked for the Social Security Administration for years. The "heroism of the mundane" is his answer to those who would consign common life to a limbo of boredom. He now lives quietly in the South.

Book preview

Prologue

I am Simon Magus the stitcher of past and future. I ply my trade where the tired, the old, the dispossessed of the world are wound on the great loom of Government. They come before me, their lives a tangled skein of memory. Mother and father, friends and loved ones have fallen by the way; the past has faded; the things that were left behind have moldered and are scattered. The mind of a son, a daughter sitting before me dims. The thread is lost. Oblivion.

Then to and fro, to and fro, linking lives to lives, I assemble here the papers to prove a life was lived, a debt is owed. At my loom, I sing of the hopeful flight of youth and of consolation in old age. I sing also of desperation, of ashes-bitter desperation: the dying too young, the living too old, the past best forgotten. I am the rhapsodist of fading remembrances. I am the singer of the end of life.

But listen to my song. There is a connection that I have found among all these lives, there is a lesson to be learned, and it is this, that the thing we cling to out of the wreck of our dreams is in the end the thing that we become. We salvage a fragment, a splinter of what we thought in youth we would be. We embrace that little piece of our dream and make of it the axis of our lives. When all else is lost to chance and time, we say, ‘This I have made. This is mine,’ and we embrace in old age what in youth we would have scorned. Life is the metamorphosis of the dreamer into the dream.

1

High in a house, by faint lamplight, an old woman rises from her bed. She wraps herself in her robe, gathers letters from the table, and slowly she moves down the dark corridor to her little kitchen. The gas burner blooms to her match and she sets the white enameled biggin to boil. The smell of strong chicory coffee soon livens the air. To her cup she brings milk, sugar and a piece of French bread, and she makes her breakfast there by the table, looking out over the square, communing with the river wind.

The sun is just slipping above the levee. Its yellow fingers are splayed through the blades of grass as it pauses to luxuriate in the cool shadows. A mockingbird hops out on a branch by the kitchen window, cocks its head to listen to the moment, then it pipes the sun on its way.

The old woman has owned this house for fifty years: these twenty, a widow, but more, beyond the memory of most in the neighborhood, as Bina, wife of Antoine Delahoussaye the river pilot. When times got hard, she rented out the parlor and mortgaged the past and now she lives in the servants’ quarters. She whiles away her evenings at her sewing, half listening to her stories on the television, comfortable enough up under the eaves of her memories.

Not alone, though. Her daughters come by with their children and, now, with their children’s children. And five years ago, her oldest granddaughter came to live with her, Sephira, filling with her youth and freshness the tiny rooms and alcoves up above in the attic. These precious five years! Bina watched the girl’s progress through college, through nursing school, and on into a promising career….

That girl should have been up by now! The old woman walks to the stairs, coffee in hand, Wake up, Sephira. Sephira, wake up. Why do you stay in bed so late this morning? Sephira!

From above, Mamaw, don’t worry. I worked a double shift yesterday, remember? I don’t have to go in until this evening. Gently, I’ll come to town with you to see Mr. Magus if you like. All right? Just give me a minute..

No, child, you sleep. Sleep.

Looking inward now, smiling in grandmotherly pride, the old woman returns down the hall and dresses for the morning. Then she puts her papers in a big canvas bag, wraps her yellow woolen shawl around her, and descends the stairs.

Dawn is giving way to a brilliant day.

Fifty years ago, this was a new section of the Faubourg, close by the levee. Then, Bina and her Antoine, newly wed, stood on the galerie to look out on the river, his river. He would name the boats that plied the busy port, telling her their origins, explaining their cargoes, delighting her, and she would cling to him, secure. Fifty years ago.

Antoine was a river pilot like all the men in his family had been, back for generations. They were Creoles, free people of color, men and women of elegant carriage, fine features, lustrous dark hair, remarkable amber skin. Their rare green eyes had made their women the talk of society in the old, dead days. Antoine, Bina’s Antoine, had those green eyes; and when he looked at her the night they met, and his eyes shone out of the gathering dusk, with music all around and the smell of gardenias, she thought her heart would fly to him, really fly out of her body and go to him, it beat its wings so. She asked the Virgin for strength.

Those eyes. All Bina had to do to see those eyes again was to turn slowly and lovingly the pages of her photo albums, to touch again that dear, lost face. Or she could look into the eyes of Sephira, her raven-haired, green-eyed granddaughter, Sephira. The eyes were born again in her, Sephira, sleeping in her room in the attic above, sleeping in the beautiful disorder of her bed. The emerald legacy was safe behind the fringes of those black eyelashes.

Sephira turns in her dreams.

Sephira’s grandfather, the Captain, was a handsome, strapping man, well over six feet tall. The night his tug was broadsided by a runaway steamer and Bina Delahoussaye knew he would not return to her alive, she thought her heart that he had made fly would break. His last homecoming, she had run out to meet him. Her steps had slowed and she had walked beside the casket, touching it, despairing, alone, no longer young; already before her as surely as the consoling relatives and the days of tears, lay drab widowhood.

But as the days passed, and she saw she would not be going with him into death, she found solace in the Church and her family. And later, when Sephira came to live with her, the girl became the center of her life. But now the city and its confounded taxes….Could they really take her house, take her home away from her like they said? She couldn’t just sit idly by.

So Mr. Magus at the Social Security became the middle passage she traveled out from the retired neighborhood: daily Mass; into the teeming world; home again. Day after day she brought him papers and letters; she came to his office, sometimes just to sit, to coax a benevolence out of the stars just by being there. She couldn’t just sit idly by.

But last evening a letter had come from her son: Mama, you’ve got to choose between the old home place and coming north to Chicago..Come North. I’ll take care of you..Come North and live with your grandchildren in a fine new home. She pulls her shawl close about her. ‘Come north, indeed!’ And she steps into the morning.

The sun rising over the river has thrown the facade of the house into a blue dusk. As Bina crosses the square toward the light, the shadow of the house reaches out one last time to touch her on the shoulder.

She turns. Who? She smiles. Old man! Give up our house now.? With all our memories there? And our treasure, our Sephira? Give it up? Impossible. To live on a square, she sees him say in sepia memory, To live right on the square. It speaks well of you.

So proud! She smiles. Rest, Old Man. Don’t worry so. I will never move away. She looks back, and Antoine’s green eyes, so big in his golden brown face linger over the house of shadows and light. But she must turn on her way. She clutches her bag to her.

A little dust devil is spinning along the edge of the square, down the row of cottages which look into her windows. It carries a sheet of paper that loops and sails and skitters to her feet.

The Church admonishes every pious soul to work to make the seven days of Carnival the best of all. We need cooks, roustabouts, carpenters and barkers. We’ll have mechanical rides, even a Ferris wheel. Ours is one of the last neighborhood festivals. It is a spectacle nobody should miss. Come one, come all to Place Antoine!

She hears the echo of celebrations past, the shouts of children, the murmur of adults. She sees the skyrockets spangling the night with chrysanthemums of gold green fire, hanging in the wind.like green eyes. His eyes. His eyes that were born again with Sephira. Perhaps that was why the golden child was her favorite, why she could never let go now.

Place Antoine, she laughs. Another year come and gone, she sighs.

The mockingbird has flown up out of his tree, and stands on the tile that caps the roof ridge. He watches the old woman as she floats out of the blue shadow before the house; how she turns as if in conversation then resumes her way, her footsteps turning the silver dew of morning a mossy green.

He launches himself on the morning air, gliding above the narrow streets of the faubourg to the Church of the Epiphany. He knows her daily rounds, and he spends the Mass singing with the organ from the highest spires of the church. When the bell signals the Consecration, he is borne aloft with the wafer and flies to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. The old woman will not tarry now. But while he waits, he spies a little caterpillar making its way along a crack in the pavement. Unchastened by the homily to love one another, he does his stiff-legged dance: step forward, wings up and wide, then down by your side, forward, and up and wide.the insect cowers in his shadow. When at last the bird looks up from his meal, he sees the old woman step aboard the Ark, the bus that runs along Flood Street; then he flies home to wake Sephira with a serenade. Responsibilities!

Sephira sits up in her bed, looking around her, focusing on the familiar, modest refuge of these last five years. Stretching her slender arms above her head, she swings her legs out over the edge of the bed, feeling for her slippers, shivering slightly.

She is tall, and her legs are long. Very long. When she sits to listen to her grandmother or when she sits at her work, she folds those legs in the most disconcerting ways, now to this side, now to that. Why, it seems when she wears those brief skirts her grandmother so frowns on, and when she crosses those beautiful legs, they could entwine three or four times around, they are so supple, so graceful. Her sleek golden legs.

Lovely Sephira, stretching golden in the morning.

2

Simon feels his way among the tables in the deserted cafeteria.

He edges over to a wooden partition and slides one of the plastic chairs off its perch. He sets down his cup of coffee, slumping toward it, inhaling it, but he is unable to drink it. By the glow of the vending machines he rests his head on his arm, covers his eyes and sleeps. The cafeteria employees amble in and blink the fluorescent lights on overhead, and..

A streetcar comes to a halt before Simon in his dream, clanging, vibrating, full of light and noise. All aboard, shouts the motor-man. Time to get on our way. So Simon steps up and in, dinging his dreamfare in the box.and his knee thumps the table where he is sleeping, jostling his coffee, waking him in time to catch the cup.and he sleeps again.

Janet is chastising him right in front of the kids again,

You miserable excuse for a man. You come here after you abandon me and these two babies. Get a real job, why don’t you? instead of that woman’s job of yours. Send some real money, like a real man. Why you can’t even get it up..

His cue to leave.

Out on the porch, little Markie reaches to be picked up, and Simon’s anger evaporates. He smiles in his sleep. It’s always like this: extremes of hot and cold to make a boulder crack. He lifts the child and presses his lips against the fat little face giving him a loud raspberry kiss. Markie giggles and hugs back as hard as he can.

Janet watches through the screen door, her arms folded.

Joey, runs up the front steps and stops. He is clutching a small doll but he stops to contemplate this little devotional, watching, deciding whether he wants to be included. Of the two, Joey, older and more pliant, is the better student of Janet’s lessons in hate: he has become almost totally indoctrinated. Markie has an easier time of it; and it often happens that he speaks for both boys, saying in his silly quacking voice things the older child cannot even bring himself to think out of loyalty to his mother. But still, to Joey, this sunny day, all that hugging might be too good to miss.

Janet watches, too.

I miss you, Daddy, Markie quacks and great tears well up in his eyes. And in Simon’s eyes there in the cafeteria. And Joey throws down his toys and runs to hug Simon’s leg, looking up into his face.

Simon stoops, still holding Markie, and lifts Joey. I miss you, too, boys, he says, his lips moving in his sleep. He sets them down, kneeling to be at their level. See ya soon, guys, OK? But he is thinking, ‘Damn, they’re all I have and she’s going to take them from me.’

Janet can see the anger in Simon’s eyes, but more, it is as though she can hear what he is thinking. She opens the screen door, never taking her eyes off him, and draws the two children inside. Daddy has to go now, boys, she simpers. He has to look for a real job. Be careful, Daddy, she says, mockingly. Wouldn’t want anything happening to our provider.

Why was Simon always stymied when she delivers those inane punches? But here he stands thinking of a comeback when she slams the door in his face.

And so now he is walking, walking to blow off steam. ‘Better go home,’ he thinks. ‘Home, hell! Tail between my legs, back to my apartment, back to sitting there feeling sorry for myself and crying for my kids. Home!’ He clenches his fist around the coffee cup.

As he moves along the old twilit street, the black families on their porches watch him silently, ignoring his ‘Ev’nin’s,’ seeing something he does not see, somebody following him, right behind him. And now he can feel it: somebody big right behind him. He turns.a big shadowy figure.he turns in his sleep.and something heavy strikes the side of his head, spins him around. He reaches out to grab hold.of his cup.and he cries out.in the empty cafeteria.and he hears how he garbles the words even as his teeth clench together, and he sees in slow motion how he falls, losing consciousness, flailing his arms wildly, falling off the side-walk.falling off his chair..

Hey, Simon.. Magus! Someone was shaking him. He sprang awake, sitting among the tables in the cafeteria, trying to focus in the glare of lights and the clatter of the breakfast shift. Wake up, man, the voice was saying. They gonna be servin yo himey butt on a bun if you don get it in gear. Shaking him, again. Hey, man, what is it with you? Wake up. It’s 8 o’clock awready.

8 AM! Hell, not again. And Simon lurched standing, still squinting into the lights at the silhouette of the speaker, a scrawny woman, handbag flapping, gesticulating at him. Thanks, Manon, I owe you one. I’m late!

Wouldn’t want nothin happenin to ma man, came the woman’s baritone. Jus happens yo day start a little ahead o my. See you at 12:00?

You got it. And Simon ran off through the crowd at the elevator, do-si-do-ing a Christmas tree by the door to his office, tumbling at last into the middle of a meeting.

.and I’d like to mention in passing, Horsey Harold was intoning, that it behooves us to be not only in the door (which is when your pay day starts) but sitting with the work we are working on at your desks or duty stations (whichever happens to be the case) at 8 o’clock AM which was several minutes (or at least half a minute) before it behooved some of us (or at least one of us) this morning to take time off from his promiscuous wanderings around..

Simon settled into a seat beside a friend. He says, ‘Behooves us’ again, he muttered to himself, and I’m gonna put horse shoes on him.

I’ll hold the fucker down for you, Martin said out of the corner of his mouth, then he looked up seraphically and yawned as Horsey scowled over at them.

Yule lights blinked and buzzed as the meeting droned on.

.and since we’re losing stats on overpayments, Horsey looked over nervously at Mr. Baumgartner, the manager, Main Office is telling us, it’d behoove us to start learning from the private sector and begin puttin pressure, er, I mean, he checked his notes, sweating, ’aggressively pursuing’ the money those deadbeat., er, our claimants owe us. So it is my job.pleasure, to introduce Mr. Dunn from the main office, uh, Main Office, who will..

Shit, whispered a gorgeous blonde to Simon’s right. Dey ain’t no way I’m gonna sit true dis crap. She snapped her gum. It’s so hot in heah [snap]. I mean [snap], dey coulda turned on de vents or somepin. She reached one hand down zipping open her thigh high boots to the instep in a slow, erotic zip. She began to massage the stretch of leg slowly.

Forcrysake, Sandy. Simon bit his knuckle in mock agony.

So hot in dis tight leatha, she breathed.

Forcrysake, girl. Simon looked around, half rising to ease his enthusiasm.

Just then, Mr. Dunn was looking out over the audience to find volunteers to explain classic money recovery philosophy. He saw Simon stir in his seat. Yes, Mr., uh..

Magus, Horsey threw in, looking over at Simon gleefully. He knew Simon ignored office training on principal and he saw a chance to expose him.

Good. Mr. Magus. Please. Dunn gestured like a conductor giving the downbeat.

Simon stood up. Well, uh.Mr. Dunn is it? He tried to buy time. I knew a home economics teacher named Worms once.oh, and a lawyer named Shyster. You don’t suppose, Mr. Dunn, that our names predispose us for certain professions in life, do you?

Well, I don’t see..

No I suppose not. But to the point. Yes..What was the question again?

There were snickers from the crowd.

Debt collection. Dunn was patient with the natives.

Ah, yes. Simon cleared his throat. The people who come to us rely on our accuracy. Dunn nodded approvingly. They rely in good faith. Dunn could not agree more. Often, unfortunately, this reliance is misplaced, and ..

Uh, excuse me. Excuse me. Dunn smelled a socialist and tried to flag Simon over.

But Simon was rolling: So my question is: Should we try to collect the money we paid these people? Mightn’t we consider this accidental payment of a small amount of government money to a person already several thousand dollars in debt, a kind of welfare..

Uh, excuse me, excuse me. Someone else. Dunn tried to find another upturned face, pointing in desperation to an employee several rows away who was staring at the ceiling. Uh, you..

The volunteer jerked awake. Snickers from the crowd.

Simon stopped and looked around, bewildered. Then he went on: I’m talking helping the poor here, not more debt..

Excuse me. Excuse me.

.I’m talking forgiveness..

And I’m sayin ‘Can it,’ Magus, Horsey Harold jumped in, and everyone laughed openly.

Simon sputtered and went out. He sat down, his hands still open at his sides, half in oratorical flourish, half in confusion and his outstretched palm came to rest squarely on Sandy’s naked thigh. Oops, sorry, Sandy.

I ain’t, she said and looked over to him [snap], fluttering her eyelids, her nether lip innocently between her teeth.

Simon smiled weakly and looked down. God. This is all I need. At the edge of the hundred and sixty captive, shuffling feet, he saw a roach eyeing the crowd. Good luck, amigo, he thought, and as if on cue, the insect plunged in, thorax heaving, determined to reach the other side and freedom.

The great federal office building where Simon worked sprawled across most of a city block. Row upon row of huge fluorescent lights glared down from on high, sterilizing the brain, reflecting over and over in the huge windows, canceling the outside world in those reflections, filling the sky to the horizon. These were the lights that guided the traffic of seekers and workers back and forth through the day of claims-taking, across the black and white chessboard floor, up to the waiting area and back to the crunch of desks and file cabinets.Here and in that reflected, phantom office out beyond the windows.

The roach again. It was coming right at Simon, half way through the crowd, gaining confidence. Go for it.

The lights. They were the lights of the life of the manager, Mr. Baumgartner. Just before 8:00 AM, Baumgartner always took his place at the door to watch the employees come in for the day’s work—and to chide any latecomers, usually Simon. Then he would set off down the long rows of lights toward his office, his tall frame stretching upward, adjusting the fixtures with his umbrella until his path was perfection and all his ways were light. And that was it. That was the sum total of his notion of what it was to manage eighty plus people for the Fed. At 4:30 PM, he emerged from seclusion and went home.

‘What about making something of a life,’ Simon was thinking bitterly. ‘Instead, look me. Look at these poor clowns,’ he looked up with real scorn in his eyes. Horsey was sitting absently picking his nose. ‘Oh, he’s pleased with what he’s found. And Baumgartner, Baumgartner checking his watch as this shithead Dunn drones on. Pulling down their fifty, sixty thousand a year. But where is the life well lived? Something of depth and beauty.like pearls: sand, the grit of life becoming pearls. Life defeating hardship, beauty out of adversity. Where is beauty, something enduring? Where is.? What the.?’

The roach had taken a detour. No, no., Simon called out silently. It was heading toward Mr. Dunn. No, stop! But too late. With a stomp Horsey Harold ended a promising career

3

Simon was back at his desk after the meeting.

Sandy, he said to get the girl’s attention. We’ve gotta talk about this morning. Uh, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. Now..

Simon had just gotten Sandy from Angelica across the office, in trade for his old secretary, Mrs. Gooch. Kind of like big league sports. Simon and Mrs. Gooch just hadn’t worked out. The blacks in the office avoided her like the plague, although they begrudg-ingly admired that fact that of all the whites who despised them, she alone came out and admitted it. But Simon, whatever his lack of circumspection, hated racism, even unrepentant, unconcealed racism, and for months he had lived in dread of incurring the old woman’s wrath. If a secretary sets her cap against you, well..You spend more time with your