He was strangely affected by the symmetry of his face. Strange, he thought, a man never thought how wondrous was the construction of the body. What was the matter with men?
His ears.
They were like shells; the poets knew what they were talking about after all. They were pink shells, the bony structures exactly the same on each side. All right, not exactly, he thought in deference to semantic principle. But close enough to make a generalization about it. And through those shells he heard the riot of the city’s street outside.
His eyes.
They shifted onto themselves.
They were most important. The eyes always were. They gave away the secrets, showed fear, indicated hope or love or hate. The face was a barometer sometimes. But the eyes always for him who could see it.
There were two puffy lids on the top and bottom of his eyes. The lashes grew out and up, out and down. They met at the comers of the eyes to brush together.
The eyeballs themselves were sunken in pits of darkened skin. The darkened skin was dotted with what looked like dozens of tiny, various-sized blisters.
There was yellowish crusted matter on the inside edges of his eyes. And from the red milky interior, wavering lines of red moved out into the whites like scarlet threads glued erratically to the curved surface.
The pupils looked like feather fans spread all the way around into a circle, running back into themselves.
The feathers were dark green at first sight. Moving inward however, he noticed that they grew lighter and lighter until, surrounding the jet black pupil, they became a delicate yellow-brown. The color of the door panels, he thought.
And the entire, ruffled iris fan was mottled with specks of brown and tiny ellipses of green surrounded by yellow.
He stared into his own eyes until they weren’t eyes anymore but strange, marvelously hued circles of color. Vaguely, he wondered again if he could be like Jose Ferrer in the picture and hypnotize himself into getting up.
Not yet, he told himself, a little while longer. He went back to his face. It was easy to get lost in the examination of it.
He looked at his eyebrows.
They were thickly haired, dark blonde. The hairs were short near the middle of his lower forehead. But they got longer as they ran over the eyes and thinned out into the temples.
There were three lines in his forehead.
They wandered through the pale, porous flesh. When he made his brow taut, he could see that along the lines were rows of closely packed, tiny blackheads. And when he raised his eyebrows, the flesh bunched up into curving ridges and more lines sprang into existence.
His hair stood up like a tangled blonde bush.
The hairs were long and bunched together. They curled up and ran wild over the side of his head and over his ears. There were specks of dandruff showing through the thick mass of strands. They clung to the scalp like snowflakes on a rock.
He held the mirror back and looked at his entire face from crown to chin.
All that incredible effort, he thought, that Herculean task of assortment and composition coming to this—a face.
And an ugly one.
It was grimy and bearded and sallow.
But even so it was an incredible piece of work.
And, as he put the mirror back on the table, he thought, that was only the outside.
He thought of the inside, of the fantastic tapestries of nerves and veins and capillaries. Of the endless skeins of intestine and tendon and muscle and ligament, the tissue, the glands, the entire, appalling complexity of it.
Who could design such a thing?
The question came naturally.
For a moment it made him shiver. It almost thrilled him to wonder of it. For the first time in many years he wondered if there might be guiding hand, a force.
With strange wonder in him, without fright, he closed his eyes and wondered if maybe there was a God after all.
5
He dreamed about a banquet.
He ate chicken and potatoes and corn and peas and cake and pie and ice cream and he drank a gallon of water and a gallon of milk and a gallon of soda. Ooof!—he said in the dream, I can’t eat or drink one more single thing!
6
He thought to himself—I must look like a man in a coffin.
7
He almost cried out in horror when he saw his father lying in his coffin like some hideous painted doll.
The face he knew was pasty and lifeless. He could hardly bear to look. When his aunt asked him if he wasn’t going to kiss his father goodbye, Erick was struck with terror and couldn’t move or reply. He could never have put his lips to that cold, dry skin. His mother drew him away from the coffin gently and led him out.
He hated the funeral.
It was dismal and morbid. Some thin old man from their church performed a sort of ritual over his father. Erick sat there and felt the hair rising on his scalp. He thought his father was listening. He thought any moment his father would sit up and tell them all to go home and leave him in peace.
He was disgusted with the meaningless chatter that relatives used at funerals when they hadn’t seen each other for years. Asinine prattle about how so and so had grown and how terrible a blow this was to them and how natural he looked.
God! Always how natural he looks. He had thought that was a joke, a cliché. But apparently the overuse which had made it a cliché still functioned actively.
Natural. Whispers of his father’s last painful moments, his contorted face and sweat of agony all resolved now into gentle, everlasting lines.
He hated all that.
When it was all over they went back into the sunlight. To Erick it was like coming back from the dead. Back to the harping world, the clang of trolley cars, the sound of heels on the sidewalk, the breaths of a living planet. He left his father behind. Soon his father would be in darkness and they would throw dirt over his face.
His mother went to the burial. He went home with his sister. When they reached Grace’s car, he put a handkerchief on the seat for his aunt. He was always a gentleman was what she said. In tones indicating that he was nothing else.
Maybe she was right. He’d never know.
When they got to the apartment, they went up and talked a while with his aunt. Then she gave him money and Erick went down to the bakery to buy some cake. He knew he wouldn’t eat any. He couldn’t eat for a long time after seeing his father lying there dead with his thin hands on his chest and that ugly brown suit they had placed on him, changing his character completely. Everything was false. And there was no longer any way of believing in immortality.
While he walked to the bakery he began to think of his father.
There wasn’t much to think about.
When Erick was very small his father was only another face, a voice among voices. When he was a little boy Erick hardly ever saw his father. He was working and Erick had to go to bed before his father came home.
Once in a while he came in and talked to Erick. He never understood his father. He was sleepy and his father’s voice was a far-off drone and he fell back on the pillow. Then his father would kiss him on the forehead and go out, closing the door silently behind him.
Now he was dead and Erick was only fifteen.
What was there to remember? The bad things? Yes, he could remember the bad things.
He remembered his father’s drinking. Remembered how his father stayed away from home for long periods of time and then returned contrite, for many weeks. Before Erick got to know him at all he was living by himself and Erick was with his mother and sister.
He remembered the day he’d gone to camp. His father came by the house and Erick had both his mother and father to take him to the bus.
He sat inside the bus and talked with them excitedly. He couldn’t tell whether they were strangers to each other. They were very polite. But all Erick knew was that he was going to camp and that he was going to cry before they were even out of sight.
He kissed his mother and shook hands with his father like a man and waved until the bus turned the corner.
Then he cried.
Later that year, the club showed movies of the busses going to camp. Erick saw his father standing there straight and tall, his arm around his mother’s shoulders waving to Erick, smiling.
Why wasn’t it always like that? Why wasn’t he always there to wave to Erick and walk with him and tell him things only a father could tell a boy? What was it worth to go to a ball game or a movie or bowling once in a while? Was he supposed to glory in a few moments, act as if nothing were wrong? He wanted more than that.
He never had more.
Now he was dead. Erick was fifteen and his father was dead. Moving through the streets in a coffin to his last port.
He remembered the night his father tried to beat him.
He was all alone in the house. It was at a time when he missed his mother so much when he was alone that he sat and shivered until he heard her key in the door. He could never sleep. There were endless wild plans of getting up and walking down to the trolley station in his pajamas and waiting for her; of going all the way down to the church or wherever she was and standing outside until she came out.
That was why he was glad when his father came in.
But his father was drunk. Erick was very disrespectful. He made no secret of his scorn. His father ate food in silence and whenever he said anything Erick answered him in an insolent manner.
Finally his father’s icy demeanor exploded and he chased Erick into his room and tried to beat him. Erick struggled and flailed wildly and struck his father in the face, crying out in tear-ridden fury.
Then he was suddenly sitting on his father’s lap and his father was talking to him very gently. He tried to tell Erick that he loved him but that he should treat his father with respect. And Erick asked him to stop drinking. But he brushed it aside and told Erick not to worry about that. Erick cried a little more and then his father went back to supper and Erick did his homework, shaking every once in a while with a sob.
Later he heard his mother screaming at his father for having touched Erick.
He remembered the Christmas Eve his father came home drunk.
He remembered the look on everyone’s face when his father came in. He recalled that they didn’t know what to do, so they joked about it. Even his mother had joked about it. Perhaps for Erick’s sake, he thought now.
But Erick didn’t like it. Trying to laugh at little incongruities in his father’s thick speech. Trying to look amused while he fumbled terribly after insisting on carving the roast. Laughing out loud as he tried to pour salt from an unlit candle. Smiling pleasantly at each other while he struggled to open his gifts and told them all over and over how sorry he was he didn’t have enough money to give them presents.
It wasn’t funny. Not to be patronizing to your own father. It was ugly and tragic. The remembrance made Erick shudder.
That night before Christmas when everybody was asleep and his father was snoring in his bed in the pantry, Erick cried and buried his face in the pillow so no one would hear him.
In the morning when everybody was still asleep his father got up and sat in the kitchen drinking coffee.
When Erick came in his father told him with carefully affected casualness that a neighborhood theatre was putting on a kiddies Christmas show that morning. He put a quarter in Erick’s hand and said Erick could make it if he hurried.
Erick told him he wanted to look at his presents. He told his father he was too old for kiddie shows.
His father said to keep the money anyway for a rainy day. Then he went back to his proud silence, staring into his coffee with bleak eyes.
If only he had gone.
If only he had exulted over and over again what a wonderful show it was and how much he wanted to see it. If only he had grabbed up his hat and coat and run out in glee so that he wouldn’t miss a moment of it.
He didn’t do that. He stayed home to look at his presents none of which came from his father. And his father’s Christmas was lost. Forever.
And now he was fifteen and his father was dead and there were no more chances. No more fears that he would come in and ruin their meals. No more guarded talks about him living alone and working at odd intervals. No more little amounts of money coming to his mother once in a while.
It was all over.
Near the end of his father’s life, Erick used to visit him occasionally in his room in downtown Brooklyn.
He tried to remember what they’d talked about. He didn’t think they ever became more intimate than discussing the marks on his report card. His father always signed that until he died. With his florid and important looking signature. Erick had the best signature in the class on his report card.
Was that what he had a father for?
Then they’d walk down the street and Erick would sit and drink lemonade and eat pretzels while his father drank something else.
He would try to look interested and listen to the bad jokes the bartender told him. But soon he’d get down from the stool and mention that his father had promised to take him to the movies.
And his father would give him a quarter and tell him he couldn’t go and Erick had better go by himself.
And he had to walk away from his father. Wondering what it would be like to walk in the park with him. Wondering if his father ever longed for his company the way he longed for his father’s. Didn’t his father want to go to the zoo or go to the beach and romp?
Why did his father stay away from him?
Before he died, his father started to write the story of his life.
If he had only finished it, Erick thought as he came back from the baker’s. Then he might know all the things about his father he wanted to know.
Was the shore too dull and tiring for his father after living on the sea for years? Was the restraint of marriage too much after half a lifetime of adventure?
In the beginning of the story his father wrote that when he was a little boy of seven years he climbed the mast of the schooner. He went all the way to the top and looked around and saw his home town far beneath on the shore like a doll’s city.
His father had written that he felt like he was sitting near God, looking down at the world and wondering what could be done about it. There was no dizziness, no fright. He was high, high, almost up in the clouds, moving with the wind, looking down at a world that wasn’t real at all. But only a toy.
8
No, not yet. Just wait a while then you can get up No I’m not trying to put anything off I’m just being practical that’s all If I had to wait this long just to move my arm then doesn’t it stand to reason I’ll have to wait a little longer before I can sit up Longer before I can get up that makes sense doesn’t it Yes of course it does make sense Well I’ve got to kill a little time then I don’t want to sleep either What shall I do Oh I know Let’s see it’s about eleven fifteen I’ll think until noon They tell me or I read somewhere I don’t remember which Anyway I recall someone writing or saying that if you sat and wrote for half hour or more you would get to the bottom of your troubles I mean if you just wrote what came into your mind without concentrating or making anything special up that you would finally dig through the earth of hidden emotion and find yourself staring at the stark roots of the matter At the cause of your foibles and at the hidden meaning to all your futile pretendings Well I don’t know whether it goes the same for thinking but I might as well trait It should prove interesting anyway and anyway by that time I’ll think for forty five minutes I mean forty five or so I’ll be either better off or I’ll be a raving madman Oh Hell how could I be worse off I’ll be better off so I’ll start thinking and anyway I said that time by the time its noon I’ll be thinking about getting up and I’ll get up too by God so I’ll get into this damned thing It ought to be interesting I don’t know but you’d think it would be anyway because …
Eyes closed.
I’ll start from the
essentials The elemental facts of me which are not much I’m 24 years old This is indisputable I think unless you are the crumby sort of bastard who will dispute any damn thing just for the sake of disputing I don’t think you are I hope you’re not you slimy crab you ugly drip of a lobster you lost cause you endless falling of disreputable snow You crowded corridor of lousy detergent rain you hopeless end of the last mile You crumby Well the hell with that I don’t want to go off my rocker right off the bat Out of the cradle endlessly rocking That was an expression used in a picture I saw once It was a silent picture I saw once It was a silent picture made by D.W. Griffith that master of history and hokum that prolific spender and corn merchant and genius I saw this cradle up there on the brownish tinted screen and there was an old woman rocking this goddamn cradle see and I suppose the baby in it was supposed to be the world or something Maybe history it was supposed to be Who knows Well the hell with it anyway Anyway as I recall this old fart was rocking this kid and they told four separate stories They told about the Wall of Babylon or was it Babel Who knows and the great carnage anyway and the disgusting ribald rites they conducted inside those hateful walls Why should I say disgusting and why hateful I use are the words I really feel and if I say that the ribald rites were disgusting that I think sex is bad when I think of it fast and sudden Does that mean Oh shit in the handbag what’s the difference Up yours with gauze for the cause and where is my wandering boy tonight Anyway they told about the walls of Malapaga no I mean the goddamn walls of Babylon and those luscious wenches on the inside taking it minutely until the walls came tumbling down Jericho Fred Waring and his Pantsylvanians and there goes the rose down the chute and there’s an end to that I wonder if I should …
Eyes opening. Return. Displeasure. Eyes closed again. The struggle back.
Then they told about Christ by Christ by Christ You who cry the name of this soul into the air Who profane him Profane sir suh who can profane this dead man I ask of you He is not to be profaned Who can do it anymore than has been done already by Judas and Pilate and all those poor benighted fags who directly or indirectly drove nails into those wretched palms Can you picture that you bastard you slimy crab you empty pot of dung you finder of tripping hammers Let me ask you that you fool Can you possibly conceive of what it would be like to have nails driven into you, right through your goddamn blessed hands Well picture it then Try to lift up your feeble minds and try to imagine it Picture it Feel it you dogs Feel the pounding pulsations of the hammer Feel the cold steel nails stinking into your flesh I mean sinking not stinking into the palms not kisses but nails and I kissed her in my dreams and now I’m back to her But of course it would have to end with Sally because that is the power over me that is far more powerful than I dare admit That is the root is it not I don’t know Whether it is the root or not Does she hold this power over me I wonder this and I wonder that and cry out in the night Sally I have lost you Nor have I lost you accidentally Not to another nor to fate nor to the harpsichord of chance playing a grotesque melody in the midnight sun and Father Hubbard is a slimy crab Say what the hell is this slimy crab business Am I perhaps referring to my progenitors Maybe that is what happens when you think long enough You go back to your ancestors You start to think as if you were a middle age knight No I mean a knight from the middle ages not one who’s bald and forty and you say Gadzooks and my fair flower of a lady and I’ll joust for thee let me put this handkerchief against my breast so that when the wood lance pierces my chest and the bones are crushed and the blood pours like a fountain gushing from my chest your snoring milady will staunch the flow and together we will walk down memory lane me copping a feel with my mailed hands you old bitch and slimy crab And you go all the way back and I said once Man is but a child born of a cellular throb A moment ago man is but an infant Groping for a vision.