Hunger and Thirst

  And the doors were wrong. The side doors opened down and gravity would keep pulling them open. And the door to the hall was in the new floor and it was a trap door that had to be locked or else gravity would pull it down and you would slide down and fall into the hallway.

  And suppose gravity, too, changed in the new arrangement?

  Then everything would be insane.

  The light chain and bulb would be standing straight out from the wall. And the bed and the rest of the furniture would be hanging from the air, clinging to the walls.

  He shut his eyes. It grew too confusing. He wasn’t standing up anyway. He was lying down. And the ceiling was still the ceiling. It was just in front of his face instead of over his head but if it was …

  Oh shut up, shut up, shut up!

  Unexpectedly his ectoplasm froze and he became a bowl of jello.

  The line occurred to him, the first line of a story that had no more lines. He had written lots of them. He had books of first sentences without stories. Like—He was always very happy around Christmas time when he thought of all the lovely things he wasn’t going to give to people he hated. And—Roaring with laughter, he was led to the slaughter. And—Lord Geoffrey pulled the cord to summon the butler and flushed the livingroom.

  And once—Did you ever have a cockroach in your mouth?

  21

  Hell broke loose!

  The phrase exploded in his mind as he jolted into wakefulness.

  Thunder roared. The sky was white with lightening. Great rain drops hurled against the window pane, plummeted by the raging wind. They shattered and ran. He heard them bouncing, an endless ocean of them careening off the glass, off the window sill. He heard them splattering on the floor.

  It only lasted a few minutes.

  But while it lasted he heard faucets running, fountains running and brooks gurgling and rivers rushing and waterfalls roaring and oceans thundering down mountains of water. And his tongue waited for one single small drop of it.

  Not forthcoming.

  FRIDAY

  1

  The house shuddered.

  The giant truck pounded its tire fists on the earth and made it shake.

  His eyes opened a little.

  His face was dull and lifeless. His eyes were heavy lidded and dead.

  His lips clung together dryly, like blotting paper.

  He felt frozen there. He felt as though he had grown to the bed, been attached to it by a million tiny shoots, stuck there like a piece of moistureless gum.

  He shut his eyes again. His chest shuddered as a yawn went down him instead of out of him. He was dry and numb and slack. His legs had no feeling. Only his right arm had any sensation at all. And the back of his neck.

  There was no saliva in his mouth. His mouth was all blotted up and dry. Someone had taken a huge piece of blotting paper and patted the walls of his mouth and reached down to pat the walls of his throat, sucking out all the moisture, leaving not one drop of it. Blotted until the blotting paper had stuck to the walls and it had to be pulled off taking part of the throat lining with it.

  The air tasted warm and dry. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. It was clinging there as though it had been glued tight or was a growth on the flesh.

  He had dreamed that he woke up and found a great blackish lump of dried defecation on his left leg. He had gotten up and moved cautiously toward the door, careful, very careful not to shake off the lump. My goodness, he had said, it happened to me, just like I imagined it happening to that poor fellow lying shot in his room on Third Avenue.

  And he had opened the door to go down to the bathroom. But there had been someone walking down the hall and he had to draw back quickly and shut the door so they wouldn’t see him. He had waited until the person would go away. But that person kept walking back and forth like a soldier on guard and, finally, he had to go back and sit down on his bed. He lay down and he thought—God, I hope nothing ever happens to me like this. This is terrible, what if it happened to me like it happened to that poor fellow who is shot in the back.

  The he woke up.

  He lay there, his mind clicking slowly and degeneratively, like the action of a cobweb-heavy machine. Click, click, bump, click. Got to oil it, the thought occurred, the damn thing needs oiling bad.

  Next door, the drunk was coughing apoplectically on his bed, spitting up bloody pieces of his lungs. Erick listened to see if he could hear the old lady. Somehow it seemed important again for him to locate himself and his surroundings. He had to know just where he was and just who was around him. The feeling to be located mathematically recurred for a moment and then died. His mind was drifting too much to concentrate on any feeling whether it was interesting or irritating. Only one thing remained clearly, needed desperately.

  Water.

  He thought of water as he kept trying to dislodge the lump from his throat. As he tried again and again to swallow, feeling the stolid, oxlike patience of himself in trying.

  Without success.

  Funny, whispered his mind sluggishly like someone speaking half asleep. Funny but I never realized that water is the most important thing in the world.

  His brain stood there and watched and agreed. Yes, it nodded. Yes, it is. Water is the most important thing. More important than money or love or death or God or anything.

  Water.

  Nobody realized it. That was the subtle terror of it. Not a soul but he realized it. It was really a distinction if you wanted to call it that. He would write a book called Water, The Greatest Thing. Everyone would read it and everyone would know that he was right. They would stop short and look amazed and slap their foreheads and say—Good God, we’ve been blind!

  How could anything be as important as water?

  The body was more than ninety per cent water. That made water the most important thing in the world. If you dried up and had no water there wasn’t even ten percent of you left. That proved easily that water was the most important thing. You didn’t need food and you didn’t need sleep or God or love or even air because it was too hot anyway. All of you needed was, the most and absolute all you needed was—

  Children what is the most important thing?

  Answer—Water.

  Q. Why is it the most important thing?

  A. Because it is water.

  Q. Why is it more important than anything else in the world?

  A. Because it is water.

  Q. What is the most important thing?

  A. Water.

  His tongue stirred. It clung, it pulled, it tried to dislodge its dry stickiness from the roof of his mouth. Then it released itself and fell down woodenly across his bottom teeth and stuck to them. I’d like a drink of water if you don’t mind. Please. I’d like a drink, if you please. Rising fury. No, just water. No beer or wine or soda, they don’t amount to anything. They aren’t any good. Milk? I piss on all cows. Water will be fine, thank you. That’s so, water is the most important thing in the …

  Over ninety per cent.

  The figure stuck in his brain. He couldn’t imagine it. Why didn’t he soak into the bed then? Why didn’t he run over the edges of the bed and splash on the floor? Why didn’t he evaporate? The answer came—

  You are evaporating.

  He stared blankly at the ceiling. His eyes were like red and white balls of gelatine in the sockets with a greenish child’s marble set in each one. He didn’t blink. It was too hard. There was hardly any moisture left in his eyes. They were drying out.

  A train rolled heavily out of the elevated station. Its sound rose and rose and became like high wind clawing through the trees. He heard it. He saw it on a lake, tearing up the surface, chopping the surface into tiny waves. His hand stirred on his chest. He felt the fingers close on the left pocket of his khaki shirt.

  He had dreamed he was in Lynn’s apartment.

  The faucets wouldn’t shut off. A main was broken or something. He was running back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom.
Every time he touched a faucet the damn thing broke and shot cold water out, all over him. It ran over his face and into his mouth and soaked his clothes. He laughed dizzily as he hurried through the livingroom dripping wet.

  What the hell’s the matter with you? Lynn said, I thought you knew how to fix them. Lynn was sour. He was reading the Sunday Times. He had a hang nail.

  Ha ha ha ha ha, Erick answered and fled into the kitchen. He pressed his hands against the one faucet that wasn’t broken and it snapped and shot cold water all over him. He couldn’t get his breath from laughing so hard. My goodness he said to himself, why can’t I get these things fixed? It’s going to ruin the linoleum and the floorboards and the plaster on the walls and the landlord will complain and the neighbors will be taking showers in their livingrooms. He ran out of the kitchen dripping and swallowing a mouthful of cold water.

  Come on! Lynn complained, I thought you said you could fix it!

  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! was all he could answer, bursting with amusement, gasping with laughter, gagging on it, choking with it.

  Turn the water off! ordered Lynn.

  Oh, ha ha ha ha !

  Listen I’m going to call a plumber, damn it!

  Tee hee hee hee hee hee!!

  Are you listening to me, you idiot?!

  Ho ho ho ho ho ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

  And the cold water dashing in his face and soaking his flesh and bursting into his mouth and down his throat, wet, wet, wet, cold cold and cold. Water, cold, sparkling, icy water, chilly, delicious, thirst-quenching, crystalline, magnificent, superb …

  Water.

  That had been another dream.

  There had been a string of them. An endless series of them liked serials. Him in the rain. Him swimming in a lake. Him caught in a sinking boat and standing passively in the corridor as the cold water sloshed up to his neck and over his mouth, his eyes. Him in a water drinking contest, lifting up cold wooden kegs dripping with moisture drops and pouring down quarts, gallons of water. Him standing under a waterfall in his overcoat, cold and shivering and soaked through.

  And always laughing.

  Falling off a dock into the ocean and laughing like crazy. Falling off boats and trains and cars and wagons and bicycles and landing, always, in water.

  People tiptoeing up to him and dashing cold pitchers of water over him as a joke. His body inundated with water, soaking it up, drinking it in through every pore …

  He was dry. He was hot. And dusty.

  He moved his head. It rolled on the pillow with a jerky motion; like a robot’s head. He looked at the empty table, down at the pillow on the floor, over at the coat, the dead-brown-edged rose, the money, the hat. He blinked once with effort as though someone had shone a bright light in his drying eyes.

  Then, sluggishly, he reached up and closed his fingers over the white towel on the table.

  He pulled harder, letting the weight of his arm pull down on it.

  Finally, the towel tore loose and skidded over the table surface and slid over the edge. He held it suspended over the floor.

  Then he lifted it over the table again.

  A groan fluttered in his dry throat like the sound of an insect’s wing whirring.

  He shook the towel feebly. He held it as close to the window as he could. He shook it slowly, jerkily. Someone see, his mind ordered groggily. Someone. Bring water. Someone see. Now. See. Bring water.

  The towel dropped from his hand. The effort was over. He knew that it was hopeless anyway. He knew that there was some invisible barrier around the room. Some shield. Some coating through which his efforts could not pierce.

  He was isolated.

  Completely and irrevocably. Something had thrown its mantle over him and would not let him out from under.

  He drew back his hand and let it drop on his chest. Stupid to try. No one would see. His fingers were numb. He didn’t notice the moisture on them from the edge of the towel where the rain the night before had soaked it.

  And, in a little time, it had disappeared.

  * * * *

  He looked at his shirt.

  The government gave it to me, he thought. They fed me and clothed me and gave me lots of water to drink. Father-Mother Army. He wore this shirt in the summers. In the winters. It had brown buttons. It had two pockets with buttons on them. They were unbuttoned, the pockets. Threads stuck out of it. The sleeves of the shirt were too short.

  He looked down at his body as if it were another’s.

  Just to lie here, he thought, helpless. Looking at the ceiling. Being unable to stretch, to let the bones crack out of their lethargy, to scratch, to get out of these clothes and take a bath. The thought seemed amusing. Yes, he would crack all tradition. He would take the first bath in that squat, dumpy bathtub. Even if he had to use his nose for a stopper and had to swallow all the water, he’d do it.

  He saw that his organ was hard again. He didn’t feel it at all. He felt as removed from sex as a eunuch. He had been emasculated. He tried to think of sex, tried to remember for a moment holding Leo’s naked body against his and kissing her; her lips; her breasts; her stomach; her vagina.

  His face didn’t change. The thoughts were uninteresting, they did not arouse in any way.

  Anyway, water was the most important thing.

  Take a bath! Are you crazy? Waste all that water! He tried to open his lips to assail himself. His lips parted with a dry, cracking pop. He swallowed air.

  It was hot. It seemed to shrivel up the membranes in his mouth and throat. It was like opening up an oven door with your mouth wide open and sucking in the blunt waves of heat. His lips fell together again. He tried to swallow the lump in his throat seven times before it stayed down at all. He moved his throat patiently, persistently, as if his were the throat of an idiot, too stupid to know when to give up.

  The lump came up soon after anyway.

  What was he supposed to do?

  It was easy enough to think of death at night and accept it. In the daylight it was harder. He heard life all around him. It had a million smells and tastes and feeling and he couldn’t believe really that he was going to die.

  It was impossible.

  Could a man die in the middle of a city with thousands of people all around him and every facility for bringing him back to life waiting for his call? How could a man lie motionless on his bed day after day, unable to rise? What could he do? How did he pass the hours? Just by going over the past?

  It wasn’t enough.

  He didn’t feel like thinking. He wished he had no brain. It was only a hindering lump of grey anyway. It did nothing concrete, nothing worthwhile.

  If he were only an animal he would have died long ago. Or at least he would be ignorant of what was going on. Outside and inside. And, really, that was the only feature of the whole thing that brought pain. Ignorance was bliss. True. Too true. Pain came in knowing what he had missed and what he could never have. He would much rather he was an animal suffering in dumb silence, with mute pleading eyes and no comprehension whatsoever of the horror he was experiencing.

  Because what made death so horrible to man, he thought with sudden revelation—was man’s ability to experience it intellectually. Man had to cope with death. Man had even created the word. The animals had no word for it, no backlog of frightening tradition. But man did. He was at endless odds with his own visions of death. He kept trying to understand, to pierce the mystery of death. Or, at least, to ease his poor mind with various salves of the spirit. But, in some way, he had to resolve his mind. And, although his mind was thoroughly inadequate to the chore, it was at least capable of filling him with terror, of magnifying, of distorting and intensifying all the stark horrors of the unknown.

  The mind could always manage, in a pinch, to make things worse than they were.

  It someone would only cut out my brain, he thought.

  He closed his eyes. I’ll sleep, he told himself. I’ll lie here sleeping. That will be shutting off thoughts anyway. It
will be passing the time quickly. And the sooner it passes the sooner I’ll be released.

  He realized that he was expecting death. Even in the daylight. Not so much brooding on it as just simply waiting for it, expecting it. As one might lie abed and wait, without excitement or fear, for the coming of some well-known visitor. So, he told himself, the case is simple. I’ll sleep and either someone will come and rescue me or I’ll die.

  Casually, he felt around the bed with his right hand until it closed over the jagged chunk of mirror at his left side.

  He held it before his face and opened his eyes.

  He looked at his whiskers. They were almost a quarter of an inch long. Shaggy, he thought, Leo, I’m shaggy. He looked at his nose, shining greasily. At his colorless, dry lips. He looked at his right eye. Unblinking eye, he thought. Stupid ox eye. Dead man’s eye.

  He tilted the mirror and saw a part of the window reflected in it. He saw the muslin curtains hanging limply in wrinkled folds. He saw the other steam pipe. He saw the railing of the fire escape outside, the rusty vertical bars.

  And, far out, through the gauze of the curtain he saw the bright morning sky.

  It was a beautiful day.

  The sky was bright blue and glaring, he saw. It made him blink slowly. No, it wasn’t blue after all. It was white, white as sheets hanging up to dry in the sun. And hard to look at. No clouds. All glaring white that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  He saw the buildings far away, the one with the water tower on it and all the others. Why can’t I go out with my look, he thought. Why couldn’t he fly out on his glance, riding on the rays of light and be where the buildings were reflected? He didn’t want to be trapped. A mounting sense of frustration gripped him as he lay there looking out at the living world and knowing that he could not reach it under any circumstances.

  Drawn by the world and drawn by death. It was like magnetism. That was the word. Magnetism. He was a magnet too, all his parts held together by magnetism. Why didn’t the world magnet draw him to itself, suck him out of this room and pull him away to life.