Bram - The notorious dr. august: his real life and crimes

Life is eternal, but lives are short. Immortality is my

I have lived a picturesque life. I see my life

We rode for an hour and came to a camp

I dreamed of city streets and featherbeds that night, and

The sun finally came up; the smoke-hazed clearing was flooded

We ran into nobody that day, neither my indifferent rescuers

There was rain the next day, not a downpour but

It took us four days to reach Norfolk. It would

There was the thunder of drums, a joyful blare of

How did we make our way north? I did not

But I had more pressing matters on my mind than

Like the saloons in that happy, depraved age, Roebucks was

You must remember. I was only sixteen. The sexual instinct

April arrived, the trees turned green, the streets turned to

Enough of my words. Let us leap ahead a few

We steamed into Liverpool on a cool May morning through

We went straight to London from Liverpool. Surely the sun

Opening night. London. The Rosegarden Theatre. Oh, yes, I am

And what do we hear from our little diary keeper?

We returned to our hotel, and that very afternoon I

The next day, while I entertained our patroness after breakfast,

Very well, then. The story behind the note? Lets hear

Needless to say, my temper was not just over their

Thats one gloomy tune your spirits playing today, said Mrs. Tarbell

I wanted to leave Baden after my swim with Isaac,

My last day in Baden began like all the others.

We entered the Hotel Royal, and Isaac nervously asked at

Very well, then. Very well. Lets wrap up this sorry

What a queer bunch we Victorians were. Or rather, are

We began our new life of foreign parts. It unfolded

It was odd, however, to live in the shadow of

Enough about Isaac and Alice. Whose story are we telling

Theres still nothing but expenses in Alices diary? Im not

Then we went to Rome. It was 1886. I forget

There was no panic, no anger, no tears. Alice calmly

She didnt recognize me. Men age more quickly than women,

We crossed the sea in a trim new steamship powered

And it was a peculiar household, in many ways. Five

I decided to forget Eusebius. I would have to fake

Meanwhile Alice settled into her own life at Yali Ashe,

I continued my sessions with Fanny, though not daily. I

The next morning at breakfast the same old wind-up boy

So it began, our divided life of lurid nights and

It seemed to last forever, even as it passed quite

Augusta, said Isaac at breakfast, your mother tells me your

The next morning was warm and overcast, close and humid.

I did not expect Freddie to come down to breakfast

On a warm afternoon in August 1886, in the European

I do not remember how I passed that night, only

And that, Tristan, was how we lost your father.

But the waltz in the music room did not really

It all came down to money. Money was all we

We sailed out of Hamburg on a gorgeous new luxury

We found rooms that afternoon in New York, at a

Months passed. I did my twenty daily shows at Hubers,

Such a gray, dreary, stupid time. For me, at least.

Paradise blazes in the night sky: luminous palaces, spectral towers,

And yet, when all was said and done, we had

Suddenly it was 1911. Such an odd-numbered year means nothing

Mother and son were both asleep when I got home

The ocean blended with the twilit sky, the low waves

But it was not a vision. Dreamland was on fire.

I cannot say how long we stayed in the water,

I was glad to be back at church today. Not

L IFE is eternal, but lives are short. Immortality is my rock as well as my bread and butter. Yet I still love the mortal, the temporal, the physicalthe luxuriant overcoat of the Oversoul. My own coat is in tatters, but I remain inordinately fond of it. As my sojourn here approaches its end, my Metaphysicals suggest that I record a few scenes from my time among nafs and knaves, gods and ghosts. And with the friend whom I loved for sixty years. Loved yet never understood. Perhaps I can begin to understand him now that he is dead. A message from the other side assures us that he has departed the world, this time for good.

Very well, then. I was born. In 1850 in New York.

I end my days in the city where I began, a fine irony for someone who has been out in the world and beyond. But were in another part of that city, and a whole new century. When I was a boy, this was a mere village north of town, a handful of steeples and rooftops visible across the meadows from the promenade atop the high walls of the old reservoir at Forty-second Street. Now Harlem is a city within the city, a realm of squealing children and fussing mothers by day, laughing men, braying autos, and raucous new music by night. I like this music, loose, humorous grab bags of mood and melody performed by self-made royalties: King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Prince Jazz. It pours from the clubs when you walk me through the raccoon-furred crowds of Lenox Avenue on snowy evenings, a bald white crow in dark glasses on your tolerant, guiding arm, or insinuates itself through the ether into a radio cabinet in our snug little rooms outside time.

It has been a marvelous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio. Oh, yes, the last was invented in 1862. By Giacomo Barry Fitzwilliam, my uncle.

Well, he was not really an uncle but a distant cousin. And I suspected early on that he did not invent that intimate act, or it would not bear a Latin name. Uncle Jack was neither a Roman nor a priest. He was a musician, a gloomy violinist with drooping whiskers and the lean build of a bat or badly furled umbrella. He toured the smaller cities of the East as the American Paganini, believing he paid Paganini a great compliment. Everything unkind that gets said of musical artiststhat we are vain, petty, self-centered, and madcan be said with perfect justice of Uncle Jack. I was his accompanist for a time, on the piano in smoky theaters and drafty town halls, aboard trains and coaches where I tended our luggage, and in the sagging beds of cheap boardinghouses. I was also adept on the melodeon, pipe organ, and transverse flute.

Aunt Ada turned me over to this pompous scarecrow when I was fourteen. Her tiny rooms on East Thirteenth Street, behind the Academy of Music, were crowded by her two ambitious, pushing, opera-singing daughters. Augustus, you are in my way. Augustus, take this note to the theater. Augustus, you are in my chair. Their enormous balloon skirts squashed through doorways and whistled against the wallpaper. Quarters became more crowded still with the return of their adored brother, wounded at Chancellorsville, and there was no longer room for me.