“Is there?” he asked
But the walls were silent. And he tried to sit up so he could wash his face. But he couldn’t move. Only his right hand twitched a little.
I can’t move.
That was the crux of it. That he had soaked himself like an impotent child or that there was money on the floor or that the rose was dying—all that was unimportant.
He couldn’t move. That was the only thing.
The rest was emptiness. The rest might as well not exist for all its importance.
If there were no coat on the floor and no hat tilted against the chair back and no scraps of financial paper on the rug and no peanut butter assailing the air with its putty flavor and no shriveling rose—what difference would it make to him?
Those things revolved about him. And he couldn’t move. Therefore they were worthless. The coat was worthless because it was of value only to wear and keep him warm. He couldn’t get up to put it on so it was of no value. The money was worthless because he didn’t have the means to get up and spend it.
That was why he had wondered if the trains really went on running after a person died.
It could have been that the entire universe was just a ruse to fool him and that everyone had their own universe of the mind. And it could also be that he was the only one and that it was all—the people and the cars and the trees and the skies and stars and all—put there to dupe him. And when he died there would no longer be any need for it to go on. So that the trains might disappear and the world and the universe go—pop!— just like that, the very instant breath ceased in his lungs.
He didn’t care. He stopped thinking about it and listened because the church bells were ringing.
He listened carefully, not because he wanted to hear everything, not because he felt any longer that he must catch every single element of his surroundings so that he could be that much more alive and present in them.
Simply because he wanted to know the time.
He cursed the traffic for its noisiness and its lack of consideration. He gave half a thought to dying for an instant until the traffic had disappeared and then becoming alive again so he could hear the bells ringing.
Ding-dong-ding-dong. That was fifteen minutes before the hour. What hour? He’d have to wait.
He thought again. He wondered if that mattered either.
Because what was time of intrinsic worth to him? Without his movements to be guided by its instructions, time was nothing but a worthless set of partial measurements. So they followed the revolving about the sun and the spinning about the axis. So who in hell ever told the Earth to spin around in something like 24 hours?
Did he?
All these things, tangible and otherwise were not worth a penny to him. Because they were apart from him.
Odd, he thought. Being here in this room. So ugly. How was it to end? Would the police come and find him? Would the landlord? No, the rent wasn’t due for two weeks yet.
Would Leonora come? No, she hated him and the room too. This is the ugliest, dirtiest room I ever saw in my life, haven’t you got any self respect at all? She was in her tan jacket when she said that. And he had said, no one asked you to come. And said something else which made her suddenly breathless with a vicious anger and she couldn’t find the right words to yell at him and finally she stamped out and flung the door open because she knew he was right.
But she was right too.
He looked at the room through hot, dry eyes.
It was. Ugly. Absolutely. You go on and on and time passes and you accept anything. He simply didn’t notice it anymore. She had mentioned it and it had come as a sort of mild surprise. Because he had grown accustomed to the dirt and no longer saw it.
It wasn’t always like that. He was brought up in a clean immaculate home. And would have felt uncomfortable if he weren’t living in a clean immaculate home. Once he had to have clean walls and nice furniture all dusted and everything spick and span. And himself always clean and immaculate.
He remembered college, the bathroom down the hall from his room. He used to spend an hour at a time down there taking a bath, washing his blonde hair, shaving and, very carefully, brushing his teeth and using dental floss. Then he’d clean his nails. And he dusted his room often and had clean sheets sometimes twice a week.
It seemed fantastic to recall that now. He’d had the same sheets on the bed for a month and a half. And had never thought about it until then. It simply had become a world where thoughts of how many sheets you had on your bed did not exist. And one could go down and down to that world and never once see the steps on which he descended.
He began to think about his old home when his mother and his sister Grace and he lived together. He remembered how nice his mother kept it.
What would she think of this?
God, he could almost see her stricken and terrified face as she stood over his bed and looked down at him. He thought—it’s good she’s in her grave and can’t see into this room. See him in it, lying urine-soaked and helpless, an old man’s bullet in his back.
And what would his father say, he thought. Never mind this Erick, he’d say, be a gentleman and all will follow. He felt his features tighten in uncontrolled anger. You stupid old drunken failure! cried his mind.
And Grace—what would she say?
He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure whether she’d be annoyed or sympathetic. There was no way of knowing.
Grace would be home now. In her clean and pleasant Brooklyn home with the two girls. No, Susan would be at school because she was eight and had started school soon after he’d departed from their home.
Lying there on the wet, uncomfortable bed, he thought of Susan’s chubby body, her limbs sturdy with health, her cheeks apple red, her energy boundless. He saw himself in the backyard with her, pushing her on the swing, her arcing up into the sunlight, her brown legs flopping, the skirt of her dress fluttering up over her ruffle-edged slip and her laughing and crying—Higher, Uncle Erick, push me higher!
Laura May was probably playing in the backyard with the boy next door. They would be digging in the sand pile probably, erecting fallible castles of the young. He could almost feel the warmth of her arms in the sun and see the speckled gold of her pigtail-braided hair sticking out from beneath the little red sailor’s cap she wore.
Life, its visions and enticements were full on him as he lay there helpless, unable to move his limbs. It tortured him to be cursed with such violent imaginings at such a time.
And Grace, where was Grace?
In the kitchen perhaps, maybe washing clothes in the creamy white machine, watching the shifting soapy waters soak through and press dirt from the material. He could almost smell the pungent, nose-wrinkling odor of the soap. Stocks of odor committed to memory were released and what he had not used before he utilized now and tortured himself with the using.
Maybe she was baking a cake. Like a crazed torturer he stood over himself and pounded in memories of her strong, white hands beating up the flour and the eggs and the baking powder. He watched her pour it into the pan, slip it into the oven. He felt the hot blunt blast from the oven as she opened it. Suddenly remembered standing in Sally’s kitchen and smelling the lamb chops while she smiled at him. The hot, delicious tang seeped into his brain. Oh Sally, he said, if you only knew how…
The drunk in the next room was hacking and gagging.
The sound filled all space and drove away thought. For a split moment there was nothing else in the universe but the drunk coughing bloody phlegm into his fetid mouth and spitting it into the side-dripping wastebasket. If the universe were only an illusion for his benefit, it had suddenly become an unbearable one for everything had disappeared but the sound of the drunk spitting fat greenish oysters from his grayish lips.
He listened to it, caught fast in the room.
His mouth spread out into a thin white line. He hated the drunken man. God damn you—die! his mind raged bitterly. He wanted to shout the words at the
drunk, stand over him with a gun and fire endless bullets into his stale, reeking body.
But he couldn’t move to kill. And even the words of hate would not form properly and the fury lashed back into him and shook him. Die, you pig! You gagging horse, you useless, brainless idiot!
The coughing broke off. Silence spread itself on the slice of his brain. But he still saw the drunken man, thudding back onto his grimy pillow, panting exhaustedly, his drawn, unshaven face half red, half yellow with subsiding apoplexy.
Erick couldn’t stop it. He broke wind.
The sound was a gassy rush of air that sounded like a pathetic old man looking up to the heavens and crying—Ah! There was no rifle shot quality, no explosive sound. It slid from his body. Without his will. He hadn’t meant to do it. Again it felt as if someone had taken charge of his body and given it the command to break wind. Now his bowels would perform unbidden he thought in teeth-gritted anguish. What good were the bowels if he couldn’t control them?
The odor reached his nostrils.
It was sweetish and clinging and he could almost see the air dancing with fetid particles of smell. They glistened green like the backs of fat blow-flies. He closed his eyes and grimaced savagely.
Duck or you’re a goner!—yelled the whimsical portion of his brain, the portion that enjoyed everything from misery to elation.
Groggily he looked down at Ava Gardner, feeling somehow embarrassed to have broken wind in her presence. “Sorry,” he said to her and then wondered why it was that people talked to photographs and pet dogs and curly-headed dolls.
He looked over her swelling bosom, the inward curve of her ribs, the slight prominence of her stomach, her smooth legs, the blue nightgown folds gathering at her navel.
He looked up at her face. Who are you? he asked. Who am I? Who are any of us? The entire spectacle of the world and its people came over him again and he would rise up and cry—How long has this been going on? Or say like Lynn in a rare moment of self-revelation that night so long ago—Stop the world, I’m getting off.
He looked at her. He wasn’t trying to think. Yet his brain clicked out its endless progressions.
There you sit frozen in time, he thought to her, showing the people the nice barely veiled teats for ten cents a throw. What’s the point?
What is the goddamn point may I ask? He closed his eyes. He saw the picture still, meaninglessly. And kept asking pointless questions. There he was paralyzed and he kept asking questions of a photograph on a movie magazine. That was the true callousness of the brain. Its innate viciousness. For, in moments of deepest despair, observation went on, and heedless of the pain it caused, analyzed the current scene, the world in general as if itself were not a functioning part of the body but its own entity, a detached, impartial investigator carrying out its never-ending probe into the meaning of things.
What made you leave home, he asked. What made you go to that studio? Was it private or was it part of your movie studio? What impelled you to strip naked and then to slide that cool silk nightgown over your dark hair, down over your soft nude body and to sit down in it, posing, shoulders back, breasts outflung to the universe?
Ava, what?
He stared at her, eyes opened for the clinching question.
She didn’t answer him.
Oddly enough, for a moment, it almost surprised him. Sometimes every proportion became so distorted in the mind that the prospect of pictures talking became normal, even expected and common.
But she didn’t talk and the fact of it brought him back. But the questions went on unsatisfied, probing and needling. Why do I call you by your first name? Miss Gardner then. What made you do this strange thing? Money? Notoriety? What notoriety is there in placing your torso on the newsstands for ogling idiot minds? What glory in residing in dark toilet booths where twist-fingered men spill out the one remaining indication of their manhood and flush it away like dirt?
He became embarrassed again.
I’m sorry, he said, apologizing for the barbarous rudeness of his other mind. He looked at her and his mind said like some Pontius Pilate of the cinema—I find no fault in her.
Beauty, he thought. And looked at her. He framed the word soundlessly with his lips. Beauty.
And knew; beauty was nothing. It was a dream, a vague imperfect concept, a gimmick, a make-believe factor, an advertising man’s valuable commodity.
He recalled that once in college, Doctor French had told the class in General Semantics about a gorgeous girl, the most gorgeous girl in town. He told them that all the men were pop-eyed and drooling over her. He said that every time they thought about her they got a lump in their crotch. They gaped at her, at her firm carriage, her pointy breasts, her clear eyes, her fine nose, her ears, her wonderful glossy black hair, her full exquisite lips. The professor said here’s a picture of her and it was a Ubangi girl with big black saucers for lips. We laughed, Ava, pardon, Miss Gardner, he thought. And I’m laughing now.
But his face registered nothing. It all drifted away. He was back. Sorry that he couldn’t have remained in a reflected bliss but back nevertheless.
Now in the midst of growing agony again. His back and shoulder burned with a cool liquid flame. He didn’t know how to react. It felt hot and cold at the same time as if someone pressed hot ice against him pulling it away and then pressing it in so that at first he felt cold and then felt the burning.
What am I thinking about? he wondered. What am I supposed to do here? Just lie and think? What does a man do when he’s in a dirty room and
Paralyzed.
His throat contracted. He tried to think of what might have happened. He had to think of something, anything to forestall the creeping of irrational fear.
The bullet had struck his spine. It was the only idea he could think of. It had struck his spine and cut some link between will and execution.
Then he remembered sitting down on the bed the night before and the sudden violent blow across his back as if the small of his back had been a baseball and Ted Williams had swung at it with all his might and hit it right on the nose. A crushing, breath-snapping blow.
He tried to sit up.
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t move at all.
The drunk was awake. Erick could hear him shuffling around his room. He’d turned on his radio and was listening to a newscast. Odd, he thought, that you can find a newscast no matter when you rise. The drunk changed the station and Erick heard a shred of Beethoven’s Eroica before the drunk cut it off. And it made him think of the park and the merry-go-round that day.
He wondered abruptly if he should call the drunk and ask for his help.
His lips twitched. He felt them twitch and knew the answer.
In his mind he saw a vision. Of the night he came up the stairs and saw the drunk throwing a quick frightened glance over his shoulder like a rat cornered and frenzied. The drunk was stealing out of someone else’s room, holding something in his hand. He had slammed that someone else’s door and gone scuttling down the hall to his own room.
Erick saw that in his mind. And saw the money on the floor, his only escape from the city. He couldn’t call the drunk. Not only would the money be taken but the drunk might call the police on the phone and that would be the end of it.
The worse part of it was that the inner portion of his brain, ever frank and brutal, told Erick that if he were the drunk living a life as brutalized he would take the money too and forget about the poor slob of a man lying helpless on his bed. But that would only be if I were like him, he fought back as if impelled to. He couldn’t make it come off. And it made him shiver and suddenly become afraid of the world to think that even in his own mental state he would do the same thing, leaving behind the paralyzed man and fleeing with the money.
He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Because the sight of his own naked morals proved the ugliest view he could ever remember.
No, you can’t tell the drunk, he told himself, he isn’t an honest man,
not to be trusted.
And, in perverted homilies, he lost the uncomfortable sense of self that had stolen unwished upon him a moment before.
He blew out a heavy, impatient breath.
It was becoming maddening to lie there immobile and helpless and hear the radio, hear the announcer talking loud as life, hear the drunk coughing and spitting and shuffling about his room. And to hear doors slamming everywhere in the house as if to torture him and to hear feet on the stairs and know that there were people all around him. And the only one who was awake and close enough was not to be trusted even in such a moment of desperation.
It seemed unnatural to be fussy at such a moment. But he had to be. He had gone to terrible forced lengths to get that money and he couldn’t lose it now. There was time to think, he could find a better way. Maybe he could contact the old woman. There must be many ways. It seemed impossible that in a world rich with variegated circumstances he should be faced with only one alternative.
But he couldn’t spend too much time thinking.
Time was passing. He was hungry. And what happened when he really got hungry? And thirsty? He was thirsty now. His stomach felt like a vacuum and his mouth and throat were clinging dry. He licked his lips. How long can a man go without water? he wondered to himself. Food, he knew, you could get along without for quite a while. After a long while it wasn’t even a necessity.
But what about water?
He’d never thought about it much. He recalled reading or hearing that the body was over 90% water. The thought was appalling. We’re practically walking lakes, he thought. One never thought of himself as being so much fluid.
He had lived in the city and there was always water. He drank it without thought. He absorbed it from all foods and all liquids. He constantly refueled the huge reservoir in his body without a single thought as to what he was doing. Now he was faced with depletion.
How long could a man go without water? He thought.
It was a thought that never occurred to one who lived in a city where artificial veins brought him all the supply he needed. In abundance the consciousness of need disappeared entirely. No, not entirely. But it was held in abeyance in that strange cluttered storehouse where all fixations and doubts and hungers resided in dusty, tranquil silence waiting for the bidding of necessity.