It was an act of pure catharsis to hear his subterranean voice for the first time. It was the sound and the nectar of an aftermath. It was simultaneously loud, like the vibrance of a lotus, a maelstrom's voice, and melancholy and muted, like the sound of a drowned earthworm floating in a small puddle under a huge rainbow; it was chemist's voice, in its intonation not unlike the faux-nocturnal and unnatural sound a city makes outside the windows of an apartment building as, perhaps, a portrait painter, let's say, coughing up on the eighth floor, lays himself to sleep at night, that sound and that contrast; a voice which mimicked the historical Bogart-cicada sounds which are exuded by the midnights of every metropolis. The compact texture of his colorful tone was intoxicating. It was a sound, one might say, similar to the sound that a proper Haiku makes when, after it is read and digested, it plops into the puddle of the reader's poetic sense of being.

“Hello, darling! I’ll be right up!”

I wonder if he calls everybody that. Could it be him? She’d been standing in the dark room for about twenty minutes. Creaky floors. The furnished room was filled with dusty paintings, other various artwork, and old file cabinets; the most notable piece of the art collection was a large 2.8 by 1.6 meter charcoal on canvas of Frank Sinatra. The door had been open. The electric sign was lit. In the place of the soothing and enigmatic voice all of sudden arose the moth-like sound of shuffling feet. The feet approached, and they did so cooly.

After those twenty minutes of pacing back and forth with a blank face in the Faustian parlor [as she would come to refer to it in her diaries, "a real Faust's castle, full of nocturnal bliss and macabre intuitions, a cave full of uncut gems, diamonds anonymous and temporarily overlooked, hidden in the alligator-eyed dark of the cave just under one's nose, through which passes the fiendish yet horribly attractive odor of a decaying Dorian Gray...."], staring at her watch and scratching herself, that strange and honeyed voice had finally rang up from the basement or what seemed to be a room below the ground floor, the voice of a sturdy but mysteriously fickle-toned master. Could it be he?

“Well, well, who on earth is here, I wonder?” the approaching voice murmured to itself in mock earnest, as its shell shifted helter skelter up the spiral staircase with a load of books in its left arm. The shell, a handsome middle-aged man, an almost mad seeming man (mad in the Lewis Carroll sense of the term), smiled at her and bid her please to have a seat in one of the comfy chairs which sat askew before his messy desk. A crystal ball there was not. Thank God. A painting of one sat on an antique miniature easel. He placed the books on the floor beside the desk, stood up, and looked at the painting as she placed herself on the nearest chair’s cushion without moving its four upholstered legs the least bit (it was the only chair with four legs). She looked at him. His hair was gray at the roots. His watch was two minutes fast (the watch was easily observable to her, as he rested his hand at the hip). He continued to look at the painting. The dim light of the room's insides wavered as if the light itself had become self-conscious and somewhat coy and abashed.

She was still unsure. What took him so long? Did he know I was here the whole time, that someone was here? Is he the man a friend told me about? 

She cleared her throat. She didn't mean to give in to such a cliché form of a meek patron's request for immediate attention. She simply had something stuck in her throat. Doubt, perhaps.

He kept staring at the painting for some time. She felt that he had not ignored her, but simply took her sound for what it was. Doubt.

Once he finished whatever it was he was doing, he took a seat in an old swivel chair and he casually asked her what she saw in the globe which sat in the window of his parlor, under the bright electric light.

"Blue. The color blue."

"Is that all?"

"No. the need for safety."

He smiled and sat back in his swivel seat. It was not a creaky seat. Apparently its swivel is well-greased, she remarked to herself as she reveled in the simplicity, the subtlety, and the elegance of her answers; after all, she was very elegant with words, or so she thought. Blue hues and some shelter. What else could a poet, when desiring and seeking fame, ask for?

"Go to the publishers on Grant and Vine, they're the biggest house in the area, Cologne & Webbs, two experienced brothers- absolutely unmistakable characters, they'll give you the right deal. You won't find the peace you're looking for until you start selling big time and until you start seeing reviews of your books in the big newspapers and magazines, but for the next seven or so years you'll write what'll come to define the rest of your writing career. You need to focus more on what is going on at home [here he stopped for a moment and pointed to the painting of the crystal ball], here in the head of it all, and not on the outside, or the blue, as you call it."

How quaint and mystical and relevant, she thought. A real poet's bargain. My friend was definitely right, he's the artist's secret Muse. Hollywood's marbles. I wonder if D. H. Lawrence or Katherine Mansfield ever visited a place like this. Make way, I cometh! Maybe Fitzgerald or Hemingway visited one of these crazy places, sometime during their Parisian flout. I'm sure the streets of Paris are full of them and have been for the past many centuries probably, fake and onanistic and- well, wait, pause the Netflix stream-of-consciousness for a sec, the writer, fourthing himself through the walls, has just had a full on satori and he must here interrupt this story's internal dialogue to write the following short essay on the highly relevant topic of modern vanity publishers.

They, vanity or subsidy publishers, will grow in their corrosive influence, their domain and their power, in the places where they can thrive. Like weeds in a garden. I say this being an American expatriate living abroad in Spain, being one who has worked with the many options displayed in the United States and the many options displayed in Europe, and that is why I can here, and with a certain confidence, say that vanity publishers and the shameless forms of patron-exploitation which they exhibit, catching always only those gullible and vain enough to jump on, are more cohesively desirable in places like the United States, where the bigger houses run the show. They are, on the whole, less desirable than most other options, and, really, are scarcely seen or even thought about in places like Italy, France, and here in Spain where small publishing companies run the show. Always search for independent publishers or print and distribute yourself. Writers who have self-published and triumphed over the years include Frank Baum, William Blake, Henry Miller, Edgar A. Poe, Margaret Atwood, Robert Bly, Beatrix Potter, and others. Now, without further ado, back to the parlor and the magic beans of Hollywood. I hope you'll take my advice, fellow artists and writers.

Her best friend, an eccentric painter who lived over in NoHo, a painter who, moreover, had been given a "no" in response to the fame question, only the week before had told her about a man in Hollwood who had the power to see if people were going to be famous or not. It was his only skill, power, insight, gift, etc., this ability to see fame or oblivion. So far, as far as anybody knew, this local Art-Nostradamus had been correct in his every prediction without a single misstep.

She walked the streets with a smile. Our hero, our protagonist, a writer and a poet since her birth, felt brand new. For, he had, having deferred the simple directions to her which bade her visit the house on Grant and Vine, given her an affirmative. She had half believed his words as she walked out. Five minutes later she believed them completely. Yes, she would indeed become famous.

The first line of her soon-to-be-published novel, no longer just the shabby manuscript document on her drive, was written down in the leatherbound notebook of her memory:

I presided at the base of the tall, loop-mangled cliff where fell daily childhood's leaves, the starry grain of rye.

Yet, yet, as she left the parlor, something felt off about the street.

The people were there, along with the many shops, the cars, the conglomerate of street sounds, James Joyce's God, but.... oh! That was it!

She was no longer able to smell anything but the cornered insides of the parlor. This small acknowledgement of her olfactory system's strange new pace threw her off her pedestal, and she felt weary by the time she reached the publishing house on Grant.

She dusted off her pants and sighed as she walked through the doors. The two brothers who owned and ran the company were smiling behind the desk. Their front desk manager must be out, she thought. Nice place, though. One of them spoke, "Who might you be? Oh! but you have quite the resplendent aura, my dear. I see much gilded divinity in your future. On the shelf, I mean. And let me guess, you, having recently graduated with a degree, have written us a magnificent, original, earthquake of a novel?"

What, were these bastards all in this thing together? All over the world? she questioned the spheres.

She noticed something. The smell from the psychic shop, not only had it remained with her, but, beginning the moment she had entered the publisher's house it had gotten much, much stronger. The odor of the hound as it sinks its fangs into one's tender heels. The books? No, she thought. No.

Was this a bad idea? Maybe my intuition was right, maybe the search for fame is nothing but a back door which leads into the deeper hell of a vainglorious immortality....

"Is something wrong, ma'am?" one of the brothers asked. The massive Cologne & Webbs colophon behind their heads was beginning to wax slightly overwhelming to her senses.

Desperate, she executed a near impossible feat. Our protagonist, a writer who was once-upon-a-time voraciously hungry for the spotlight, backed out of the publishing house's double doors without saying a word.

Outside on the sidewalk the smell of the psychic parlor remained, in her head and all around her, a mucousy vibration, heavy and unmistakable, stringy and metaphysically durable, though it was not as horrible nor as invasive nor as pungent as it had been within the publishing house.

She began to walk, and as she did so she began to whistle without thinking to.

This was not at all how she had envisioned it, her prayers being answered. Her dreams offered themselves to her, implicitly baptizing her merest touch as the sole thing they needed, the only thing necessary to fully activate them and set their stars into motion.

Something vague and chaotic worried her. It sat motionless in the back of her mind, like the contents of the psychic parlor, like the portrait of Frank Sinatra.

What does fame signify? Oh, no. She stopped walking. She stopped whistling.

All of a sudden, it came to her. The world was gone. It had become the handsome man's parlor. Fame himself. The whole world had become his parlor. She had never left it. She would never leave it. The need for fame would eat her until she got what she desired, and only then would she see that the end of the world is not a state of mind, a time, a place, an event, or a destiny, but simply the product, in every case, of one's choice.

She thought about J. D. Salinger's life, or at least what we've come to, as an interested and adoring net public, unveil for ourselves as far as true academic and biographical letters go, and she continued to walk down the street, away from fame, away from Mephistophelian hungers, and toward happiness and the soft yet brittle scent of emerald and yellow lavender leaves in the summertime. The myriad leaves filled the mountains and the riversides, the bushes and the trees, from shoreline to sunny shoreline, and the sun was again at rest upon her face.

The world was again at her doorstep. The world as she loved it. The world she knew. The world as she would come to always remember it, before it all happened. Fame.

Fame eventually found her, though in those first moments she did manage to resist its mask. Yes, fame eventually found her, but on that florescent day The New Yorker had not yet wrote a scathing review of her coming-of-age novel about a young woman living in Chicago, nor had she yet shaken hands with her favorite writer at the conference in Toronto. No, she was just herself, just the way she would come to always remember herself, before it all happened. Fame.

Alas, the whole world had already become his parlor. She would never leave it.

The only other thing that would never come to change over the years was her favorite book, which was an omnibus of Irish legends.

Posthumously, the public was given the chance to read the edited contents of her personal diaries. They were published in a two-volume set by the San Francisco based publishers Horndon & Biss. In them, she retires from fame, saying

Don't ever write anything intended for the hands of others for the purposes of gaining renown and a name.

This pedagogical epigraph here leads us to another of hers, though this next one, she would've happily confessed, is borrowed. It sticks out like a forgotten fairy's tooth amidst the ivy-and-grass flooded accouterments of the graveyard, and it marks her site. A heavy prison of raw and unnamable emotions, echoes of something inherent in humanity and luminously dark, seemingly emit from its stone dimensions; they open themselves tenderly for any unsuspecting visitor, like a flower or a weed which sprouts from a crack in the pavement. The epitaph on her tombstone's marquee ribbon comes from a favorite children's book of hers. Its story, written in a Gaelic dialect by an obscure author and rather hopelessly translated into English by some mule's ass of a friar from the cloisters of Ipswich, depicts a child who goes about naming the other-worldly animals and plants which she sees in a magical garden.

MAKE WAY, FOR SHE WHO HERALDS COMETH

The faint yet gravid odor of the parlor's furnished insides, the ashen perfume smell of the inside's of the Nostradamus of Hollywood's bobbing room, where float, in the tarnished carnival buckets of the past, the present, and the future, the stale and world famous apples, that faint yet gravid odor, it is said (this information was dispatched and verified by a few of her friends who have visited and experienced both her final place of rest and the mad man's parlor's insides), fills, enchantedly and with invisible hands more dexterous than the fates, the hovering nostrils of any fan or literary ogler or old friend who, hoping to feel something like grace or nostalgia while standing upon her resting place, instead finds a strange smell, and a stranger feeling.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She spoke at a presidential inauguration. She led and organized various youth-based movements centered around the idea of art in the community. Her work is translated into seventeen different languages.

Yes, fame eventually found her, and, after having spent some golden moments of time inside his enchanted parlor, she had attempted to give up fame in order to live. She, beguiled, had tried weakly to walk out through the parlor's open door, out of the myth, the setting, the cast.

Once outside, she had smelled the air like a mouse in a laboratory's labyrinth.

There was no end to it. Her whole world was evermore his parlor. She would never leave it.

Our protagonist, our hero, ran away down the golden sidewalk one day, back into a remembrance of things past, a rich, wise, talent-drained bonfire, a bonfire full of crackling Promethean hungers that had been given a shockingly harmonious and innovative halfway home. She stopped writing for commercial output and only wrote in her diary. The diaries she locked away (only to be shamefully passed off at an immediately-held posthumous auction arranged quite succinctly by her two daughters and subsequently published by the purchasers, Horndon & Biss, just after she died at the age of 43 of a undiagnosed brain tumor). She donated all of her money to an orphanage foundation which was founded by her best friend, the unfamous painter, and based out of Rio de Janeiro, and she reluctantly and sheepishly gave away her belongings to various distressed family members and friends. She ran, searching every nook and cranny of the world for her two lost lovers, innocence and time. She became the ancient Egyptian god, Isis; she became both sister and wife.

She is divinely lost, she is astray, yet she will forever remain, at least throughout some of history's more quaintly named and divergent chapters, the unshakable symbol of earthly fertility. No house, no Osiris, no Horus, no career. She attempted to outrun fame himself. She ran.

But his parlor, his mysterious paintings, his tone, these Rilkian objects would always resurface and remind her that she had never left- that she could never leave the parlor of fame.