Living with Legends

       Maxwell was an old man, probably mid-seventies, with a pot belly and thinning gray hair pulled back from his forehead.  Though he was generally disheveled, his clothes unwashed, his shirttail out as he shuffled through the lobby on his way to the deli for a 40 of beer, sometimes he was more lucid than other times.  He was sitting in the lobby one day, and as I was passing by he motioned me over.  His eyes were bright and he seemed to have his wits about him that day.  “Come look at some of my gargoyles,” he said.  “I photographed them around the city with a telephoto lens.”
     As I sat next to him, he handed me a box of perhaps a dozen eight-by-twelve glossy photos.  I flipped through them.  They were close up shots of the stone or terra cotta heads that adorn the upper stories of various buildings around the city.  They were nicely done, professional; Maxwell was well known in the art world, and in the fashion world as well, which is where he made his mark in the sixties and seventies, shooting magazine layouts.  “They’re grotesques,” I said.
      “Yes, they certainly are grotesque,” Maxwell replied, as if my comment had been incredibly trite.
      “No, I mean they’re not gargoyles.  Gargoyles are animals, rather than humans.  When the stone heads are human heads, they’re called grotesques.”
      Maxwell was taken aback.  “How do you know this?”  He eyed me suspiciously.
      “I don’t know.  It’s just something I picked up over the years,” I said.  I thought about it.  “From reading books, I guess.  I used to study mythology and religion.  Maybe it was in connection with that.”
       Maxwell, who had never paid much attention to me before, started looking at me differently after that: respectfully, somewhat fearfully, I thought, as if I held some secret knowledge.
        One evening I was walking down the stairs.  Maxwell was skulking behind the doorframe and when he saw me coming he came out into the elevator lobby.  “Come here for a minute,” he said, motioning for me to follow him into the hallway.  “I have something I need to tell you.”  He spoke almost in a whisper.  “I have to tell somebody.”
          I had something to do and I was kind of annoyed.  “What is it?” I asked, impatiently.
         “They’ve been gassing me,” he said.  “And injecting me.”  He made a motion as if injecting his arm with a needle.
          “Who has?” I asked.
           “That I don’t know.”
           “Why would they do this?”
          “So they can steal my photographs, of course,” Maxwell said.  “They make a lot noise going through my things, and they have to be sure that I don’t wake up and catch them.  Of course they’re very careful to put things back the way they found them, so that then I might think that I’ve just mislaid the photographs.  But I’ve set traps for them, and so I know when something has been disturbed.”

Huddled together in the dark corridor, we spoke in conspiratorial tones.  I felt I was getting pulled unwittingly into Maxwell’s world of delusion.  Still, curious, I played along.  “Why would they want your photographs?” I asked almost in a whisper.

“Well, it’s very good work.  They can’t do work that good themselves.  That’s why they need it.  For their careers, you see.  To advance their careers.”

            I nodded my assent.  It was becoming clear that he had all the angles figured out on this one.

            “I wouldn’t reveal this to just anyone,” he said, leaning in closer and placing a hand on my shoulder.  “But I have a feeling that you know about such things.”

            I didn’t say anything, but I was becoming uncomfortable, and I wished I could find some pretext to tear myself away.

“I need to put a stop to this theft,” Maxwell went on, “which is ongoing, by the way.  And I wanted to know what you thought I should do about it.”

“Why don’t you tell Stanley?" I suggested, facetiously.  “Maybe he can look into it.”
         “Oh, he would be glad they were doing it!  He wants to get rid of everyone who’s been here for a long time so he can rent out their rooms at a higher rate.”

            I chuckled.  “Now that I can believe!”

Maxwell looked at me crossly.  “I know you think I’m just imagining this, but I have proof.  Just the other day a young man came up to me in the lobby and said they were going to take my talent away if I didn’t start taking photos again.”

            Though expressed in the language of delusion, it was a fear I understood all too well: if you don’t use you talent, it might atrophy; you might wake up one day, needing it, and it would be gone.  “Aw, come on,” I said.  “How could they do that?”

“What do you mean?  They’ll just come up and take it away.  I’m an old man.  I can’t fight them.”

I thought his delusion was causing him to make some kind of category mistake.  “But your talent is something inside you.  They can beat you up but they can’t take that away.”

“No, no no!  I said, my camera.”

“Oh.  That makes more sense,” I said.  (So maybe it had been a Freudian slip on Maxwell’s part.  Or maybe I had actually heard him wrong, in which case it had been more of Freudian listening slip, if there is such a thing.)  “Well, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?  I mean, if you took more photos.  You should just keep taking them.”

“But why should I take more?  They’ll just steal those too.”  They were selling his work for millions of dollars, Maxwell said.  He was sick of others getting all the money and all the glory.  He had seen his own work in magazines, he said, and when he called the editors to ask about it they refused to talk to him.

“I feel like people steal my ideas all the time,” I said, “but I don’t worry about it, or I try not to at least, because I know they don’t know what to do with them.”

“Well, it is shoddy work,” Maxwell acknowledged.  “They change it all around on the computer.  But you’re right that they can’t capture the experience.”

“Well, then, you have nothing to worry about,” I said, dismissively.  I was pushing through the swinging door at this point, halfway through, trying to get away.

Maxwell gave me a look that said, yeah right.  “What do you think I could do to stop this?  It doesn’t do any good to call the police.  They don’t do anything, and in fact I think they may be in on it.”
     “No, you shouldn’t call the police,” I said with a sigh.

“You think I’m imagining it all, don’t you?  I knew you did.  It’s not going to help for you to tell me that.  Maybe I am imagining it, but it’s real for me.”
      Just when I had almost made good my escape, something about this remark drew me back in.  Certainly I empathized with Maxwell: I saw in him a distorted reflection of my own hopes and dreams, myself in thirty years.  I sincerely wanted to help, but also I was in a sense nervously teasing, when I said, “What this calls for is certain amount of cleverness.  What I was thinking is that you may be able to trick these people in some way.  Maybe when you go to sleep at night you can set out some crappy work so they’ll take that instead of your good work.  If they’re such hacks as you suggest, they probably won’t notice the difference.”

Maxwell seemed to take offense.  “I don’t have any crappy work.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to suggest that,” I said, backpedaling.  “What I mean is, maybe you could produce some.  Just go out and take a bunch of random shots of really stupid subjects.  Then set them in a prominent place like they’re important.”
         "I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Maxwell said.  “It erodes the soul.”

“Maybe you could find some pictures in the trash and set them out,” I said.  “Or maybe get somebody else to shoot them for you.”
           Maxwell thought about it and then said, “Why can’t I just take them to court and let the judge straighten it out.  I don’t have any money, but surely one of these universities would help me, someone who cares about the true value of art.  They don’t care about art much in this country anymore, it’s true, but I believe they care more in  Europe.”  He then launched into a long rant about racism and anti-Semitism, and about how, if I understood him correctly, an outspoken newscaster on the local news had been disappeared and then been replaced by a more pliant look-alike.  I couldn’t bear to listen to him go on like this, and when I got half a chance I made my excuses and said I had to run.  Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton  (Next Week:  Part II The Grotesques)