Hunger and Thirst

  He tried to move his right leg, his left. An unwanted chant began to fill his brain as he fought to move. Mountain coat and piles of money, plaster cracked and ceiling cobwebbed help me up up UP! Mountain coat and piles of…

  The church bells chimed once for the half hour but he hardly heard them.

  “Come on!”

  For the two words and no more, his voice rang clear.

  In the next room the drunk stopped moving and held off his coughing. Erick felt an even more desperate need to rise now. It was as if retribution for his crime were in the person of the drunk in the next room and now he had heard him. And the drunk was going to investigate and have Erick punished.

  His eyes bulged with the effort to move. He poured every last ounce of energy through his embattled system. His legs vibrated on the bed and his arms shuddered like bridges of flesh in a hurricane wind. His entire body twitched once.

  !GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!

  Too much.

  Too much.

  He felt himself falling backward again, down, down, like the night before. He tried to cry out but his breath was gone. He felt as though he was suffocating, being smothered to death beneath some great fluffy invisible pillow.

  He landed.

  And lay there, chest heaving with breaths, his body covered with perspiration. Every joint felt hot and swollen up to twice its normal size. Every inch of his body felt expanded or contracted. He felt as though his body were a land of feudal states raging at war with each other. Tendons were enflamed, muscles were spread with liquid fire, every nerve pulsed as though they were exposed to air and some fiend was driving white hot needles into their most tender spots.

  His head began to roll on the pillow from side to side. He was in such pain he didn’t even notice it. He only noted without comprehending, the added cramps and pains in his neck, the new flush of dry heat that flooded over him. He was in flames, chained down, set on fire, charring to a hideous black.

  He closed his eyes and gasped for a breath of cooling air.

  But the air was hot, too. It scorched his throat. He kept gasping and coughing and trying to clear his throat. Somewhere in his mind, the stranger, alien to his feelings, observed that he sounded more like the drunk in the next room than the drunk did himself.

  Long moments passed.

  And slowly, as though reluctant to depart, the flaring pain subsided, unable to maintain its fiery, agonizing peak.

  A slow shifting ache took its place, running over his limbs and torso like a heavy bed of lava tearing up chunks of nerves as it moved.

  Through pain-dimmed eyes he saw the darkness creeping on the walls.

  Oh God, the night is coming, he thought in terror. It’s bad enough in the day but—

  Night.

  Black and cold and full of grating, screeching, howling noises. He was suddenly afraid of the dark again as he had been almost to his eighteenth year, almost to the time he went in the army. He feared its creeping ebony, he wanted it to stay daylight. Stop the sun! his mind exploded out in a fevered burst.

  “Joshua!”

  His voice was bubbly and feeble again. It ran from his mouth like the strangle of a drowning man. The night, the night, stalking, hanging over him, its cruel dark mantle on his face.

  He sobbed, “I’m going to die.”

  He said it in a phlegm thickened voice, full of self pity and horror.

  He was sure of it. Sure that death would come pouncing out of the night and grab him and wrap him in its black paper and carry him away. I’m going to die in the night, he thought, alone and helpless.

  He almost insisted on it now with the sudden reversal of all desire that had been a keynote of his life. The sudden petulant overthrowing of all resistance and the childish insistence that he was lost and knew it and would not raise a finger to fight it anymore. Would, on the contrary, rush to meet his doom screaming—What’s the use anyway? I can’t do anything. Come on, get it over with, damn you! A raging self-destruction, a monumental cutting off of the nose to spite the face. An acceptance of defeat rather than the expending of effort to lose stubbornness and continue the fight.

  That’s what he felt like then. Suddenly he wanted death. He didn’t care. He didn’t really think of what it meant. He didn’t know what death was. But he thought it was inevitable and he was jumping to embrace it, to get it over with and show it he didn’t care one damn bit for it.

  He lay there for a long time, sobbing and not caring what happened to him. His right hand clutching the blue striped bed cover at his side.

  It was only later that the feeling of utter depression and loss finally departed and he began to think of Leo.

  He began to hope that she would come to see him. She only lived two blocks away. She should come. She’d want to keep an eye on him surely. The way he felt it wouldn’t matter if she caught him now. Much good he’d be to her anyway, she’d probably bow out when she saw him paralyzed. But at least she’d get help and wouldn’t steal the…

  Wouldn’t she?

  His mouth tightened until he saw his own face in his mind—just like that of the old lady, petulant and unreasoning.

  Sure she’d steal it, the bitch! What did she care about him? Wasn’t it money she wanted anyway, didn’t she say it clearly, hadn’t she…

  Oh God, Leo, please come and save me!

  His eyes were staring wide into the falling darkness. He dribbled over his blonde-bearded chin as his lips formed her name soundlessly, “Leo, Leo, Leo…”

  The church bells clanked a few introductory bars and then bellowed out the hour to the lowering sky.

  12

  There was a little light, thin bars and thick bars of it hanging on the walls.

  One bar of light ran up a hill from the top of the dresser to the ceiling. Two of them lay blanket like over the typewriter table, making shadows hang like black leeches on the wall behind it.

  Other bars of light stood motionless on the ceiling until a bus or a truck or a car passed on the street below and broke the spotlight from the street and made a shapeless black mass flit across the light blotting it out for a split second.

  He lay there staring at the ceiling. From the bottoms of his eyes he saw the two transom panes that looked like dirty white sheets of paper tacked over the door.

  He didn’t make a sound. He hardly breathed. His face was set into a fixed unblinking mask. His eyes stayed open and his lips were immobile. It might have been a face carved from stone. The dirty tangled hair hung over his forehead. It might have been a dead man lying there in the darkness staring at the ceiling and the uneven patches of light.

  In the street, buses still stopped at the curb with a hydraulic gasp and started up again, their motors growling sullenly, complaining wildly in second gear, then growling back into third. Trucks still rumbled over the black gum-blobbed pavement. Cars and taxicabs still honked and wove in and out among the heavier vehicles, forming a shapeless moving tapestry of traffic. The night and the street were alarm and motion.

  The darkness shifted. The shadows moved. That one in the corner, the great shapeless one. It was a bat, a spider, a huge brittle-backed beetle. It hung loosely from the green plaster. It was waiting for him to shut his eyes. Then it would swoop or waddle or drop down heavily onto him and suck the life from him.

  Like juice.

  The room was a mass of shadows, moving and restless. He didn’t think of it consciously. All thoughts dredged on through lower mental canals. Without being completely conscious of it, he wondered if perhaps the shadows were barriers and the light portions gateways to another dimension, another existence.

  Maybe if a person could crawl through the gaps in those black barriers, he could escape to a better place.

  The amorphous thought drifted away.

  His face didn’t change a trifle. The only evidence of life in him was the shallow rise and fall of his chest. He was immovable beneath a crushing weight of darkness. He didn’t move, did not care to think of moving or t
o think at all. He felt, without conscious admission that he was as good as dead.

  Once he had felt a similar lethargy and complete submission. It was one morning when he was in the army overseas and he woke up in a muddy hole in Germany with a blanket over him and didn’t care if he ever moved for the rest of his life.

  He sensed indirectly the mass of his body resting on the bed like a solid statue. He felt calcified, a sculptured figure of stone. He could not have picked out the sensation of one muscle in his body, one ligament, one tendon. They had all run together and frozen fast.

  There was no point in fighting it.

  He didn’t say it or think it consciously. But his eyes reflected it, without a spark, without a hope, glazed, unblinking eyes. He had fought it and it had beaten him. Thirst no longer mattered. Hunger did not matter. All that mattered was that he was doomed.

  Finally he thought it. The foundation was built. It was simple to raise the edifice of admission.

  I am going to die.

  If it had been light, he might not have thought it. He might have gleaned some added hope from the light. Nothing seemed so bad in the daytime as it did at night. The darkness brought some subtle depression, some weight of despair that took a problem and blew it up beyond all proportion until the expanded difficulty hid the world.

  He accepted.

  He was exhausted and paralyzed and was in the mood to accept it. Morbid submission seemed to flow through him, an invisible transfusion from some dark vein so morbid that his acceptance was more than negative. He went forward to meet it once more, arousing conscious thought and, in a somber effort at tidiness, putting his brain to the task of placing his death within the confines of the room.

  He was on the right edge of the bed. In his mind he visualized his body, each twist of the limbs, each curl of the limp fingers.

  His right shoe was resting on the floor. He couldn’t feel it but he knew it was there because his right leg, and in the natural order, there was a right foot at the extremity of every right leg. Of course that was only syllogistic. There might be nothing there but a stump with dark, purplish artery and vein ends waving in the breeze. The idea pleased him vaguely as did all aggravated thoughts of self-torture when he was in the half-enjoyable throes of introspection.

  On his right side was the table that faced the window, the window that was open a trifle. On this table were three things resting on the dirty white towel that was supposed to be a table cloth.

  Closest to the window was the candy bar. It was almost against the brown muslin curtain. He didn’t want to eat the candy. He hated all candy.

  Next to the candy was the object he couldn’t remember. It irked him not to remember, to place his regression in the room without seeing all surroundings. As though he was a stage actor in his big scene and the stagehands had placed an unfamiliar set behind his fevered pacing and soliloquizing.

  Near the inside edge of the table where the drawer was, the rose sagged over the glass edge, its heavy pink head lolling like the great burdening skull of an idiot. The glass had water in it that was crowded with tiny bubbles which rose without him seeing them and disappeared into the stale air of the room. That thought displeased him vaguely too. It seemed unfair that there should be any process of tangible change going on when he had stopped and atrophied and was trying to identify his surroundings.

  He comforted himself with the notion that the entire room was changing and he along with it; both undergoing a great physio-chemical change that made a new room each second although it appeared the same for years at a stretch.

  He spent a little time thinking of that, taking time off from his black tour of the room. It gave him pleasure to think about things changing. It gave him a sense of comfort to know that he was merely part of a great process and that the entire thing was dying right along with him, if at a less fevered velocity.

  He listened and tried hard to hear the house and the world dying by inches.

  But he couldn’t. So, rather testily, he went back to the room and his surroundings.

  At the foot of the table was the movie magazine with its cover bent at the upper right hand corner. Ava Gardner still sat against the deep red background, looking up into the night with a pride of beauty and physical fulfillment. A goddess for the poorer kingdoms of the brain, he thought.

  Against the locked, yellow-brown door that led to the drunk’s room was the bureau. Next to it, a four-layered radiator. The mirror hovered above the squat little dresser propped on sticks that looked like bizarre elongated knights for some skinny madman’s game of chess. On the dirty white towel was his toothbrush and the wilted tube of paste with the words Kolynos Toothpaste on it and next to it was the box of saltines and peanut butter, in a half-full jar and crusted on the old, dull-edged knife.

  The dresser drawers, except for the bottom one, were pulled out.

  The left top drawer was pulled out the farthest, pulled out evenly. The right top drawer was not out so far. And the middle drawer was pulled out unevenly so that the left end of it was farther out than the right end. The bottom drawer was in all the way.

  The whole of the dresser stood like a fat little woman on bandy legs, smug and ugly.

  Beside the dresser was the wastebasket with one of his stories in it, torn to shreds. With it was a wrapper from a package of gum and a grease-spattered brown bag that still held a few cold, greasy lumps of french-fried potatoes that he had brought up to the room three nights before.

  Beside the basket was the spindly, curve-backed chair with its round bucket seat and the brown hat leaning against the back, its front brim curled beneath it by the weight of the crown.

  On the dusty rug was the coat bunched into a lumpy swirl of wool and silk lining. Behind it the pattern of bills on the floor.

  Against the far wall stood the stocky white table with the typewriter on it, the yellow second sheets next to it and the yellow sleeveless sweater tossed over the top of the case.

  Next to it was the other chair, a grimy white towel hanging over its top.

  The door and, back toward him, the closet with a jacket and a pair of blue trousers hanging in it.

  And finally, back to him, lying there motionless.

  Now.

  At least mathematically, he was prepared. He knew the room, each crack and seam of it, he thought. He was familiar with each furnishing, with each position of clothes and money and crackers and candy and dying rose and all.

  Thereupon, he closed his eyes.

  There now, he thought, you’re ready. It’s coming. You don’t have to move a muscle. Just wait.

  He waited.

  13

  Someone was raking leaves in his stomach.

  They were dragging razor-sharp rake points through his intestines, pulling away the soft, milky-fleshed walls.

  They were piling up the leaves in the center of his stomach. They were bending over the pile with flaring matches. They were setting the leaves on fire.

  He felt the heat rising, smelled the choking smoke in his mind. He grunted in his sleep, twisting his head on the pillow. He moaned restlessly. His face twitched. The fire was rising. The flames licked at the walls of his stomach. Someone kicked the leaves closer together, kicked them again into a tight pile so that they’d all ignite.

  He lurched violently on the bed.

  “Uh!”

  His head snapped up from the pillow for a split second. He didn’t know where he was. He stared down the dark length of his body. Then his head fell back and he heard the fire truck clanging by in the street screeching its message of help and axes on the way.

  His stomach was on fire.

  There were no flames to be seen but it was on fire. He felt the muscles curling up black and gutted with flame. He felt the crackling, eating fire and expected any moment that his stomach walls would burn through and the room would be filled with flaring yellow-orange light.

  “Ohhhhhh!”

  He groaned in a high-pitched, unbelieving tone, the
pain seemed so incredibly, impossibly intense. He almost felt that it must be a joke. No pain could be that bad and be real.

  “God!” The word came thickly and almost inaudibly. His right hand clamped shut, his teeth forced together. He heard his stomach gurgling and felt the spasmodic muscle contractions. A whine escaped his pale shaking lips. God help me! screamed out his mind. He dug his nails into his right palm.

  His head rolled back and forth on the pillow. He groaned in agony, feeling as though his bowels were going to explode like a volcano, as though there were molten lead bubbling in them, weighing him down and scorching, eating up his nerves and flesh. He tried to speak. The words—all right, a joke’s a joke!—rushed inanely through his tortured brain. But words wouldn’t come. There were no words possible to express the unutterable screeching pain in his stomach. It ached and throbbed and burned and gurgled savagely.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. Sense of time disappeared. It seemed he must be in hell, suffering eternal agony. He couldn’t even remember the start of the pain. It seemed to have been going on forever.

  Sweat poured over his brow like tiny rivers in the beds of twisted lines that creased his flesh. His eyes were slitted in pain, his teeth slipped and dug in suddenly into his tender gums and the pain fled through the hallways of his brain screaming—Help!

  Then his brain began to beg—kill me!

  “Kill me, kill me, kill me,” he muttered in a voice that sounded like that of a frog if frogs could talk. And, suddenly, he thought of Joan of Arc and thought it must have felt like that being staked down and burned alive.

  Pain!

  Abruptly, his bowels overflowed.

  The thick, smoking excretion flooded from him and ran down onto the bed. He felt some of it thread hot and liquid down the back of his right leg. He felt it run over his calf, the mucky current splitting at the back of the knee joint. It ran over his sock and into his shoe and over the top of his shoe. He was helpless to stop it. He tried. He tried with all his power. But the bowels belonged to someone else.