Cities of the Red Night

  And there was something else: Toby smelled. It was a sulfurous rank animal smell that permeated his room and drifted from his clothes. His father and mother had had the same smell about them, and they kept a number of pets: cats, raccoons, ferrets and skunks. “The little people,” his mother called them. Toby took the little people with him wherever he went, and his uncle John, an executive on the way up, liked big people.

  “John, we have to get rid of that boy. He smells like a polecat,” Toby’s aunt would say.

  “Well, Martha, perhaps there’s something wrong with his glands.” The uncle blushed, feeling that glands was a dirty word. Metabolism would have been much better …

  “That’s not all. There’s something in his room. Something he carries about with him. Some sort of animal.”

  “Now Martha.…”

  “I tell you, John, he’s evil.… Did you notice the way he was looking at Mr. Norton? Like some horrible little gnome.…”

  Mr. Norton was John’s boss. He had indeed been visibly discomfited by Toby’s silent appraising stare.

  Looking back, Toby could see the twinkle of Christmas-tree ornaments. Far away his father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky. The locker room holds the silence of absent male voices like a deserted gymnasium or barracks.

  The boys have built a partition of beaverboard and set up their cots in this improvised room. There is a long table with initials carved in the top, folding chairs, and a few old magazines in the main room where the gas ring is located. In one corner is a withered Christmas tree that Toby pulled out of a trash can. This is part of his stage set. He is waiting for someone.

  He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. He has never seen the other boys, a whiff of steaming pink flesh, snapping towels, purple bruises. He leans against the wall of the toilet as silver spots boil slowly in front of his eyes.

  Christmas Eve, 1923: You can see the old YMCA building. Someone he carried with: Hi/ …

  “Hi. It’s me, Toby.”

  His father points to a few boys still staying there … the shower’s silence. Other boys have gone away. Part time in this improvised room. Building has to be vacated by the folding time machine where the gas ring is hot occasionally. Toby pulled out of the mission, stage set, other Christmases. His part is six years old in the epidemic. Toilet cubicle, his old face, remote parents. Sleepy animal whiff of naked flesh Christmas geese in the sky. Silent night for someone died waiting for the graffiti in 1918. If you ask for something solid as shirt and pants walks … long sight you read The Monkey’s Paw? Years over phallic drawings snapping towels and purple bruises.…

  Toby dresses and walks back into the “living room,” as they call it. A man is sitting at the table. He is thin and white-haired with blue eyes. His pants and shirt are red-and-white-striped like peppermint. A long patched coat is folded on the chair beside him. Wisps of fog drift from the lapels.

  “Well, Toby, and what would you like for Christmas?”

  “Well, sir, I guess people ask for a lot of silly things, so I’d like to ask your advice before making up my mind.”

  “Yes, Toby, people do ask for silly things. They want to live forever, forgetting or not knowing that forever is a time word and time is that which ends. They want power and money without submitting to the conditions under which power and money are granted. Now I’m not allowed to give advice but sometimes I think out loud. If you ask for something solid like power or money or a long life, you are taking a sight-unseen proposition.… Now, if you ask for an ability…”

  “I want to learn how to travel in time.”

  “Well, you could do a lot worse. Makes you rich just incidentally. But it can be dangerous.…”

  “It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.”

  Toby experienced a feeling of ether vertigo as he was pulled into a whirling black funnel. Far away, as if through a telescope, he could see someone sitting at a table, a slim youth of about twenty with yellow hair and brown eyes.

  A fluid plop and he was inside the youth, looking out. He was sitting in a restaurant somewhere, taste of paper-thin cutlet, cold spaghetti, and sour red wine in his mouth. The waiters looked ill-tempered and tired. Now he became aware of someone sitting at an adjacent table, so obviously looking at him that they seem for a moment to be alone in the restaurant. It was a woman of about twenty-six, neither well nor poorly dressed, with an older man and woman, probably her parents. She had, Toby thought, one of the most unpleasantly intrusive faces he had ever seen, set in an oily smile or rather a knowing smirking cringe with a suffocating familiarity that pressed on his being like a predatory enveloping mollusk.

  Toby began to feel quite faint. Suddenly he spoke without moving his lips: “You’ll never get into a nice gentile country club with a look like that hanging out of your Jew face.… We like nice Jews with atom bombs and Jew jokes.…”

  Dead silence, wild-eyed faces looking for the source of this outrage.

  “Ach Gott!” A Jewish waiter slumped to the floor in a faint.

  Toby shifted his attention to a table of blacks. “Yes and the right kind of darky too, singing sweet and low out under the mimosa, not feeding his black face in the same restaurant with a white man and getting his strength up to rape our grandmothers.”

  Next a table of Latin American diplomats.

  “You greasy-assed Mexican pimps. Why don’t you go back to your syphy cathouses where you belong?”

  “That’s telling them!” said a southern American voice.

  “Go screw a mud puppy.… And if there’s anything worse it’s a murdering mick with a bomb in his suitcase.”

  A suitcase by a table of Irishmen began to tick. Toby put money on his check. He lifted his wineglass to the table of Jews: “You Jews is so warm and human. I offer to you that most beautiful of all toasts: L’chaim! To Life!…”

  He was moving towards the door. “You blacks got soul.” As he passed the Latin Americans, he twitched his hips. “Qué rica mamba.… When Irish eyes are smiling…” In the doorway, Toby whipped his scarf around his neck and shouted back into the room without moving his lips, so it seemed to echo from every corner …

  “Bugger the Queen!”

  * * *

  He opened the door and heavy palpable darkness blew in with a reek of brimstone. He sprinted for the corner in a black cloud, his red scarf trailing out behind him like a burning fuse. Shouts behind him. Breaking glass.

  Here was 44 Egerton Gardens. He opened the door with his key, slid in and shut the door, leaning against it. A blast outside, sirens, words in his head: “Air raid … the blitz.”

  He felt his way to his room at the head of the stairs. As soon as he opened the door, the sound of breathing and the smell of sleep told him that someone else was there. He touched a shoulder.

  “Hello, I’m John Everson. Hope you don’t mind doubling up like this.”

  “It’s all right.” Toby stripped to his underwear and slid in beside him.

  They lay there, listening to the explosions. The bombs seemed to walk in a leisurely way up and down Brompton Road. A smell in the room, not just of warm young flesh. It was a rank musky ozone smell, the smell of time travel.

  * * *

  Toby woke up in a dark cottage. Mother was not back yet. He was alone and very frightened. The cottage was in Gibraltar and he knew the floor plan in the dark.

  He went from his room into the sitting room and looked into his mother’s room. The bed was empty, as he knew it would be. The lights would not turn on. He lay down on her bed but the fear was there as well.

  He went back to his room and tried to turn on the lights. None of them would turn on. Now even the light in his own roo
m would not work.

  He opened the cottage door and went out. Dawn light outside, but a heavy darkness lingered inside the cottage like a black fog. He resolved not to spend another night there.

  Who would not spend another night there? He was two people—the boy who lived in the cottage and someone else.

  He saw a boat. Durban to Gibraltar. A slim youth with yellow hair and brown eyes in a blue uniform and nautical hat was the first mate. Two officers and a crew of eight on the brigantine.

  * * *

  The boy’s mother is back from the pub where she works as a barmaid. She is sprawled fully dressed on the bed in a drunken sleep. He looks around at the potted plants, a tapestry on the wall with a minaret, an ivory elephant, a glass mouse on a shelf. In the front room, a hot plate, a square yellow tea can with Chinese characters, a faucet dripping into a rusty sink. Two men are in the room: one a thin man in his thirties with a receding chin and a pasty face, and the other a priest with reddish hair and bloodshot eyes.

  Slowly the boy takes inventory of the sleazy decorations, a brass bowl with cattails in it on the mantel of the nonfunctioning fireplace, a wobbly table with a tasseled lamp, three chairs, a couch, and an army blanket.

  He is the boy, but also a concerned visitor, an uncle or godfather. He is preparing to leave. Outside the cottage is a steep weed-grown slope covered with Christmas rubbish and artificial snow. He hates to leave the boy there.

  On the slope, a paper paddle wheel turns slowly in the wind. Written on the wheel: THE MISSING AND THE DEAD.

  The priest is talking to the mother and the other man.

  “Do be careful, and if anything goes wrong don’t hesitate to contact me.”

  Dead fingers in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. “Captain Clark welcomes you aboard. Set your watches forward an hour.” British we are, British we stay. Marmalade and tea in the shops, ivory elephants, carved ivory balls one inside the other, jade trees, Indian tapestries of tigers and minarets, watches, cameras, postcards, music boxes, rusty barbed wire, signal towers.

  Coming in for a landing, he hears a tired gray priest voice:

  “And how long will you be staying, Mr. Tyler?”

  IT IS DIFFICULT IN TRAIN “A”

  On the train with Waring. Smell of steam, soot, and iron. The WCs are all clogged with shit. Landscape of red soil, streams, ponds, and farmhouses.

  I have a little round box which contains a number of scenes on parchment-like paper that come alive as I turn the pages. Some oxen by a river mired in concrete up to the forelocks. Now four figures, two boys and two girls in eighteenth-century garb, get out of a gilded carriage. They take off their clothes, pirouetting to tinkling music-box notes.

  In the train corridor, I encounter a French customs agent—a short heavyset man with a red face and bloodshot green eyes—accompanied by a tall gaunt gray-faced assistant. It seems that we are passing through a tip of French Canada and he is here to examine passports.

  The door the agent is standing before opens towards him but he is pushing the other way with his shoulder, his weight preventing two conductors from opening the door from the other side. At this point, he tells his assistant to break the door down with a fire ax. I intervene to point out that the door opens towards him. He has but to pull it open. This he finally does, then upbraids me and the two conductors for blocking his way.

  “Mais je suis passager,” I protest.

  “Quand même!” he snaps.

  Now the passengers all disembark from the train and line up with their passports in an open-air booth. The customs agent sits behind a table against a wooden partition. Every time anyone lights a cigarette a DÉFENSE DE FUMER sign appears and he looks up from the table shouting, “Défense de fumer.”

  I am first in line. The agent looks at my passport and sneers.

  “Is this something of your own invention?”

  I tell him it is something issued by the United States Government.

  He looks at me suspiciously and says: “It says here that you live in London.”

  “And so?”

  There is a girl behind me in line holding an American passport. I point out that my passport is the same. He snatches her passport and looks at it. Then he slaps both passports down on the table and turns to his assistant.

  “Destroy these documents.”

  “But you can’t go around destroying people’s passports. Are you deranged?” I ask.

  “Dérangé?” he sneers, turning now to the girl. “Is this man your accomplice?”

  “Nothing of the sort! I never saw him before.”

  “But you travel on the same train?”

  “Well, yes … but…”

  “And sit at the same table?”

  “Well, yes, it so happened…”

  “So you admit to sitting at the same table with this man you have never seen before? And perhaps you share also the same compartment? The same bed, no doubt?”

  “It’s not true!” she screams.

  Soldiers light a wood stove. The assistant speaks: “Pardon me, sir, but my son is a collector. Could I keep one of these forgeries?”

  “You may keep one. Which do you prefer?”

  “Well, the girl, sir. She is prettier. My son will whack himself off looking at it, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “Very well. Destroy the other passport.”

  My passport is dropped into the wood stove. He turns to the other American passengers.

  “All of you now come forward and surrender your lies. Documents purportedly issued by a government which ceased to exist two hundred years ago.…”

  A chorus of outraged protests goes up from the passengers but soldiers snatch their passports and dump them into the stove.

  “Well, Mother and I want you to know we will report you to the American Consul,” a tourist moans.

  The officer stands up. “The currency you are carrying is of value only to a collector. I doubt if you will find one in a town of this size.” He gets into the train, which starts to move.

  “But what about our luggage?”

  “It has been impounded. You may recover it in the capital on presentation of valid passports.”

  The train gathers speed. We are standing in a turn-of-the-century western town: water tower, a red dirt street, Station Hotel & Restaurant. I leave my countrymen waving credit cards and traveler’s checks in front of a bland Chinese behind a counter who takes a toothpick out of his mouth, looks at the end of it, and shakes his head.

  I walk along the street past a saloon and barbershop and turn into a rundown weed-grown street: Street of Missing Men. The houses on both sides look deserted. As I walk, the buildings change and the street slopes steeply down.

  BATHS OPEN DAY AND NIGHT. I go into a steam room with marble benches. A boy smooth and white as alabaster beckons me and I follow him through a maze of showers and steam rooms into a waiting room and out into the street looking for a taxi on a steep stone platform over a green slope with stone steps going down.

  We are looking for a Twin Taxi. He has a twin with him who is crippled, one leg in a cast. The alabaster youth sits next to me on a stone bench. He has no white to his eyes, which are a delicate egg-blue and shiny as glass. He sits there with his arm around my shoulder, talking in a strange language that sets off little cartoons and film sequences … languid white legs flicker … silver buttocks in a dark room.…

  I CAN TAKE THE HUT SET ANYWHERE

  I have rented a riverfront shack from someone named Camel. The river is slow and deep, half a mile wide at this point. Rotting piers along an unpaved street. Loading sheds in ruins, roofs fallen in. Standing in the middle of the street I turn now towards a row of houses. The houses are narrow and small clapboards, peeling paint, galvanized iron roofs separated by drainage ditches choked with weeds and brambles, rusty tin cans, broken stoves, pools of stagnant water running to culverts broken and blocked with refuse. I go up steep wooden steps to what had been a screened front porch. The screening is rusted
through and the screen door off its hinges. I open a padlock and push the front door open. A musty smell of disuse and a sudden chill. Warm air seeps into the room behind me and where the outside air and the inside air come in contact I see a palpable haze like heat waves. The house is about twenty feet by eight feet.

  On my left is a blackened kerosene stove on a shelf attached to the wall, supported in front by two two-by-fours. On the rusty burner a blue coffeepot with a hole in the bottom. Above the stove are shelves, some dented cans of beans and tomatoes, two jars of preserved fruit covered with mold. Two chairs and a wooden bedstead at the end of the room, a stepladder by the bed. To the right of the bedstead is a door which opens onto a bathroom with two oak toilet seats side by side, a bucket black with rust, a brass faucet covered with verdigris.

  I go back to the street and look around. At one end the street ends in a tributary. I walk the other way and the road turns inland. There is a shack with the sign SALOON at the turning. I go in and a man with eyes the color of a gray flannel shirt looks at me and says, “What can I do for you?”

  “Where can I buy tools and supplies? I just rented the Camel shack.”

  “Yes I know. Do with a bit of fixing up, I guess.… Far Junction … One mile up the road.”

  I thank him and start walking. Dirt road, flint chips here and there, ponds on both sides. Far Junction is a few buildings and houses, a water tower and a railroad station. The tracks are weed-grown and rusty. Chickens and geese peck in the street. I go into the general store. A man with pale gray eyes and a black alpaca jacket looks up from a seat behind the counter.

  “What can I do for you, young man?”

  “Quite a few things. I’ve rented the Camel shack.”

  He nodded. “Do with some fixing up, I guess.”

  “It sure can. More than I can carry.”

  “You’re in luck. Deliveries twice a week. Tomorrow.”

  I walked around pointing: copper screening, tools, tacks, hinges, two-burner kerosene stove, five gallons of kerosene, ten-gallon water container with spigot and stand, water barrel, cooking utensils, flour, bacon, lard, molasses, salt, pepper, sugar, coffee, tea, case each canned beans and canned tomatoes, broom, mop, bucket, wooden washtub, mattress, blankets, pillows, knapsack, bedroll, slicker, machete, hunting knife, six jackknives. The proprietor walks behind me writing the purchases down on a clipboard. Alligator Gladstone bag? Fifteen dollars. Why not? Jeans, shirts, socks, bandannas, underwear, shorts, pair extra walking boots, shaving kit, toothbrush.