Is that you Max?

Professor Solomon liked to think that in a small way he had been a part of it -- the 20th century. Of course he was aware of the impossibility of measuring his own impact, in the peace movement and in the break up of the Soviet block. But still, it seemed that for a while the world and he fed each other's momentum, making the aging process, his own, the world's, deeply gratifying.

After a certain line had been crossed, however, he stopped getting it. He lost track of what was going on as the world he knew birthed an equivalent world based on no principle of parity and fear, but on the simulation of these things, like a darkened equivication which perceived from the outside must look like an electronic cube with splayed wires, sparking in a vacuum.

He was 82, although his youth and the impulses of his youth still chided the stodgy impulses of his old age. Leaving NYU, he decided to contradict the wishes of his sister, currently living in Nebraska, and move East again as he had while young, as he had as a professor and cold war political tactician. This time, however, he embarked as a tourist.

He flew from New York to Frankfurt. As he had done many times in his 50s, 60s and 70s, he took the U bahn to the Frankfurt Hopfbahnhopf. At the central train station, he noticed that that old marquee whose clickety clack used to comfort him and remind him of the secret heart of travel, had gone digital therebye draining the spirit of the place, making arrivals and departures seem overly monitored and absolute, bloodless embarkations and disappearances.

He wandered the red light district immediately neighboring the train station. The red light district was a guilty pleasure. It offered him a glimpse of the realities others more courageous drank to the dregs. It withered his soul and excited him. He saw a junkie shoot heroine. The sight of the man's spiritual and physical decay gave him the shudders. Although the rational thinking part of himself saw the utility in keeping such things in the open rather than pushing them underground within a colossus of post modern developments, shopping malls, obese children, the despair that comes from having nothing really to despair about, sociological theories concocted by under read zeros driving the world to a universal state of zilch.

***

Finally, he was on the road again. The trains of the east were as they had been. Some things don't change, and the little freedoms a culture is inborn into die hard. He stuck his head out the window and breathed in the night air. The Germans and Poles were as engaging as ever without quite making contact. They looked at you, curious, fearless, remote. They seemed interested even in the lives of old men, whereas Americans had become inverted long ago, denizens of the arachnoid space.

Dozing in and out of sleep aboard the dream train, as he thought of it, he kept asking the young man sitting across form him, "Is this Gdansk? Is this Gdansk?"

He had never been to Gdansk and always wanted to go to the city of reformation architecture, revolt and kielbasa. The city on the Baltic coast, as austere as his soul perhaps. As warm.

***

"But you must come out with us!" said Stefan.

And so later he found himself at a table full of boozing Poles and Germans, a token, although young Stefan did his best. Professor Solomon made apologies and took his beer out onto the street. To the left, he could see the reflection of the setting sun on the Gdansk canal. Several tourists walked by led by a Polish guide. He found the guide's face architectural, like the face of long dead Gretchen, and as he had loved Gretchen totally, so he felt he could love the guide.

Max Von Sydow walked passed, paused as if considering something, turned, stood before Professor Solomon a pillar of gray and blond, sleet and snowy sea, the echo of voyages, of exploration and northern religion, elk, sex and death.

"Professor Solomon," said Max Von Sydow.

"How do you know who I am."

"I just know, I know certain things, come invested with a kind of knowledge, a sort of arcana, an eczema of information if you will."

Max Von Sydow was dressed in a black turtleneck with a handsome brown blazer. Something inside Professor Solomon revolted.

"What's it like to be you, so pretty?" he asked.

"Pretty?" Max Von Sydow smiled. "No one has ever mentioned. Me pretty? I know I have daisies inside but physically I have always felt like a log, like a piece of driftwood."

"You've never really known loneliness, have you? True loneliness? The task of planning your days, weeks, years totally alone." Huge tears slizzled down the professor's cheeks like raindrops on a window.

"Is that me? The sort of man who doesn't comprehend the basics?"

"So that you secretly suspect everyone else to be insane."

"You think I am this psychoanalytic type?"

"I suspect you are."

Professor Solomon sank into his beer which he gulped rapidly. "Who put you up to this?"

"Professor Solomon. You may think you know me, but you don't. See, a part of your mind thinks it knows, but you have to admit that I am external, a nothing,a figment, as is everything, these people, these cobbles, this accursedly quaint place."

"Are you even familiar with Max Von Sydow's work? Thou simulacrum?"

"Well, yes, more or less. Wild Strawberries. Old Bergman films."

"But that's just the start of it!" said Professor Solomon. "He did so much, with Bergman and with others. He seemed immortal. I'm not even sure he's dead. Is he? He may really be immortal for all we know."

"Well," said the 50ish Max Von Sydow. "I'm not sure myself, but I don't think it matters now, does it. Alive, dead. It's all on tape."

"If he's still alive, isn't this a form of plagiarism?" asked Professor Solomon.

"Now look, just stop it. Are you going to stay here sitting on this cold stoop with all the young people inside talking about the quaint old man they met, or are you going to come along?"

"Come along?"

"With me, I mean. Come with me, elsewhere, to a place other than here."

"Where will we go?"

"To a place other than here. I already said it."

He took Max Von Sydow's hand much larger than his own.

***

"I like your films."

"Thanks," said Max Von Sydow. "I myself find them indescribably miserable, like the ultimate cessation of existence. Like ritual suicide, but that's just me."

***

"Where are we?"

"Where do you think we are?"

"In a Bergman film."

"No, thank god."

"It looks like a Bergman film. Like one of his 19th century visions. Look at that clock," Professor Solomon pointed at the grandfather clock counting the seconds. It had one of those starry night sky dials with the blue background. "You're even dressed...like a 19th century banker, a petite bourgeois."

"Am I?"

"Is that a watch fob?"

Max Von Sydow grasped the golden chain, bringing out an equivalently golden watch.

"I guess so," he said. "It's my fob."

"Where is this?

"My home, I think."

Solomon looked around himself, at the antique furniture. Looking into the adjoining room, he saw a video game machine, of the stand alone variety like they used to have. Arkanoid. The pinging sounds of the game seemed to be the legitimate markers of time, the game real, the grandfather clock a prop.

"This is your place?"

"Welcome to my pad, or so to speak."

"This is kind of like your Bergman themed bachelor pad, except for that thing in there. You aren't married?"

"Well, yes and no. After so many years, the institution of marriage evolves toward friendship. The evolution is the main thing, a kind of narrative of acceptance and loathing. Sex becomes this kind of historical echo, like something from the bible, an overtone, a sense of something."

"Really? I wouldn't know."

"Or, no. It's like one of those books full of big glossy pictures of lizards."

***

Professor Solomon wanted to investigate the other room where the arcade game stood. He made to rise. As he felt himself leave the chair, his stomach heaved. The room spun and he thought he would pass out or vomit or both. He sat back down. The feelling immediately went away.

"You can't get up."

"Why not?"

"You have to stay seated there. Anchored to your chair."

"Why?"

"We're moving too fast."

"What are you talking about?"

"Help yourself to the brandy."

There was a tray of brandy, cheese and crackers before him. Beyond the big bay windows, it began to snow. Professor Solomon felt tired of the game.

"Where are we?"

"It's hard to describe."

"Are we in Stockholm?"

"Might as well be. Then again, we are far from these stupid places you think about from time to time. Very far. That's why you have to remain seated. We're actually traveling quite fast. Fractionally faster than the speed of light."

Professor Solomon looked at Max Von Sydow.

"Stockholm's a shit city," said Max Von Sydow. "I have always preferred Latin places. Spain. Central America. I feel like the women in these places are more accommodating."

***

"In case you are wondering, we are in a cave, formed by certain geological processes, approximately 300 meters beneath the surface."

"Now that you mention it, I was wondering."

"Then you are probably wondering about the oxygen, about how we are still breathing in and out," standing before him in the phosphorescent luminescence, Max Von Sydow pantomimed breathing in and out. "It's because the air, see, it comes down from a fissure in the southern wall which leads to a kind of crevasse on the planet's surface."

"What am I doing here? Is this a part of dying?" said Solomon, looking out over the cave, lit by a natural chemical process."

"Well, you could say so," said Max Von Sydow. "But then again, at this point we have to rethink certain new fangled concepts and reaffirm the old traditional intuitions. Here," he said, handing the professor a flashlight. "First there was absolute shit and then came the light."

Professor Solomon had never seen anything quite like it. The cave was remarkable. All sorts of crystals grew there. There were purple crystals, blue crystals, clear crystals, dark crimson crystals, pink crystals. Meanwhile, a babbling brook ran through it all.

"This is really beautiful," he said. "The sound of water echoing around this beautiful, indescribable Xanadu."

"I know. I knew you would like it, professor Solomon. I knew you would like it very much, and that you would feel like this is a return to something, from childhood perhaps."

"This isn't like anything from childhood."

"Not like a return? A return to something familiar? Like rediscovering a lost bag of marbles in an old wooden box, or something else American like that?"

"No."

"If you are feeling sleepy, you can lie down."

"Where can I lie down?" asked professor Solomon, all of a sudden overcome with exhaustion.

"There. In the crystal chamber," said Max Von Sydow. "Don't you remember the crystal chamber? At one point, we had a hard time getting you to come out of there. You were fascinated by the crystals and we were very worried in the beginning."

"About what?"

"About you; about the whole project."

"Where is the chamber?"

"Over there. Through that archway."

Professor Solomon went through the archway, propped his head with his jacket, lay down on the bed of crystals and closed his eyes.