DANIEL: That’s not like him. Does he still wear a black glove?
VOLTA: Yes, but with the fingertips cut off. All this comes from Dolly, by the way.
DANIEL: It’s depressing about Shamus.
VOLTA: Alchemy is full of cautions about becoming fascinated with the powers of decay. It is also traditionally held that a man burned by silver is marked by the moon.
DANIEL: (abruptly, but not demanding) I’m tired of thinking about all this. I don’t see anywhere left to go with it. What’s next, if anything?
VOLTA: Take a three-week vacation. The man I want to connect you with won’t be back till the twenty-eighth. Call around then and I’ll put you in touch. His name is William Clinton.
DANIEL: What will I be studying?
VOLTA: Concentration.
DANIEL: I thought that’s what I studied with Wild Bill.
VOLTA: Indeed. I trust you’re well prepared.
William Rebis Clinton was the ace safecracker west of the Rockies. Willie the Click, as he was known to his cohorts, could drill or blast any lock devised. However, as he repeatedly and vehemently pointed out, the highest expression of the safecrackers’ art was opening combination locks by touch alone, by becoming the spinning wheel, the tumblers and pins, by disappearing through your fingertips into pure sensation. On his fortieth birthday, Willie had resolved never again to use anything but his hands to open a safe. He hadn’t, and he was pleased. Drills and explosives did what Willie believed all technologies did: They killed feeling. By assassinating time and space under the guise of saving them, they keep people out of touch when the better state of being, according to Willie and others, is in touch. In his more delirious screeds, Willie claimed that industrialization was a Christian plot to destroy the pagan reflex between sensation and emotion.
Willie was a short, wiry man with intense brown eyes. His most notable trait was his tendency to speak in whirling bursts of proverbs, obscure quotations, metaphors, speculative observation, and oblique conceits. When Daniel had arrived at Willie’s apartment in the Mission District, Willie had taken Daniel’s offered hand and scrutinized it a few minutes before ordering Daniel to sit down and spread both his hands palm up on the worktable. Curious, Daniel complied, and then became suddenly anxious when Willie sat down opposite him and opened a case containing five silver needles, needles so slender they flirted with invisibility.
‘What are those for?’
‘The obscure by the more obscure, Daniel, the unknown by the unfathomable. To gauge sensitivity. Synaptic discrimination. Your particular neural awareness. It’s painless. Though I believe it was Carlyle who noted, “The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.”’ Willie lifted a needle to the light. ‘Now shut your eyes and tell me when you feel something – the slightest pressure or other sensation.’
Daniel shut his eyes and concentrated on his upturned hands on the table. He felt a tingling in his left index finger and told Willie.
‘Yes,’ Willie muttered, ‘continue.’
Daniel felt a burning sensation on his right ring finger. Then his left thumb itched, then his left middle finger tingled. Willie said, ‘Bah. Poor summation. A plus B, but no C. Clogged thresholds. You can open your eyes.’ Willie was glaring at him. ‘Virtual tactile insentience. A turtle has more feeling in its shell. So be it. As they say in Yugoslavia, “Tell the truth and run fast.” I’m afraid we’ll have to start with the absolute fundamentals. You do understand that opening locks is an art, and that a necessity of art is to intensify the organs it employs?’
‘No,’ Daniel said hesitantly, not without a touch of perversity, ‘I’m not sure if I do understand that.’
‘Muddy mind, troubled water. All right. Consider what Sickert had to say: “The whole of art is one long roll of revelation.” And it is revealed only to those whose minds are what Horace called “vacant” – though he was actually speaking of a woman whose heart is free. Get rid of yourself, Daniel. To open locks you must open yourself. Disappear through your fingertips.’
‘Suppose I don’t come back?’
‘A door always opens.’
Daniel started to say something but Willie cut him off. ‘No. No more abstractions for you. You are the kind who can swim in them, but you should be bathing in water squeezed from stone. If you’d please close your eyes, and place your hands palms upward on the table again.’
Daniel immediately felt something light and papery settle on each palm.
Willie commanded, ‘All right, open them.’
In his right hand Daniel saw a hundred-dollar bill. In the left, a slip of paper with a series of numbers.
Willie explained, ‘The phone number belongs to Oriana Coeur. The money is to pay her.’
‘For what?’ Daniel demanded.
‘For her profound sensual dimensions. You will see her every Thursday until you develop tactility. From seven o’clock in the evening till three o’clock in the morning on the other six nights of the week, you will meet with me here for study. We will start with alarm systems. Locks must await your work with Oriana. As an Estonian proverb has it, “You can’t expect the mute to sing.”’
‘What did you mean about Oriana’s “sensual dimensions”?’
‘Ah ha! You see? Attention begins when the imagination is seized. Oriana is a woman of the evening who has a remarkable sensitivity to touch. The fee for her company is usually five hundred dollars a night, but since she and I developed the exercise together, the charge is considerably less.’
‘So what will she and I be doing exactly?’
‘Oriana will give you the
