What?
Say what the world do if no people on it What would it do if all of us were gone It would look around and say By Gum they’re all gone and there’s no one to say I live on the world so there’s not the slightest proof that there’s a world so—Poof! it would be gone. Gone with the wind. Took her ten years Why didn’t I ever stop this my head is hot and my belly is hot and my GODAMN IT GIVE ME SOMETHING TO DRINK ORI SWEAR TO GOD I’LL CUTOFF …!!!!!!!!
You know what would be funny? If the day I die they started dropping bombs all over and the atmosphere ignited and the whole planet was crushed into dust and flushed about the universe like tasty bits of food down the gullet of infinity and the other planets would shift and they’d start crashing into each other and Velikovsky would be sitting in a rowboat out there taking notes. You know what would be funny if the day I died they started dropping bombs all over and Say if this room is getting smaller I bet it is In the night it gets big when the heat goes but the daytime it gets small when the heat comes The walls are shady and smooth no they’re filthy and cracked and chipped oh GOD THEY’RE STONE AND THEY’RE DRIPPING No they I’m just …
I wonder if I remember the commandments I think so Mom taught me good Thou shalt not kill Thou shalt not bow down to any graven image Thou shalt not commit adultery Hee Hee everyone commits adultery Who pays for it God gets his kicks in later haah? Who says you don’t think in sentences I’m no Mrs. Bloom lying in bed and musing on past fucks I’se a muggin I’m … THIRSTY!!! Oh god I’m so thirsty Goddamn it won’t you understand you idiot No maybe you don’t Listen I’ll explain it you stupid I mean Stoppid I mean OH YOU GODDMAN STUPID IDIOT WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME! Oh God. God God God God God God I’m so thirsty thirsty thirsty thirsty Oh please give me please please please PLEASE give me something to drink I don’t care give me anything Lynn put it in my mouth I’ll drink it I swear to God I.….OH GOD!
Oh yeah?
Because for all the order there is time ten times as much disorder Everybody looks for order Consider the snowflake Horse shit Stop looking for order Why don’t they list the disorder in the Hey you I’d drink blood I’d drink gasoline if they drowned me in water I’d do it What am I doing here I think I’ll get up and wash my face …
8
At two thirty he picked up the fragment of mirror and looked into it. He looked at the motionless features, the calm resigned lips, the straight nose, the gentle uncondemning eyes. He kept staring at himself for almost twenty five minutes.
After a while two small tears rolled down his cheeks and he wondered, without astonishment, how he would look if he were wearing a crown of thorns.
9
The door rattled. The window rattled. He woke up and found he really wasn’t in a strait jacket it only felt that way.
He lifted his arm from his chest and let it drop weakly onto his right leg. He took a deep shuddering breath of the scorching air. A lump moved into his throat. He swallowed it. He could feel himself drying out like a piece of clothing in the sun. The moisture was going, going.
He hardly felt the hunger now. It seemed odd but he was grateful for it. Once in a while his stomach gurgled but the contractions were less and less violent and he wasn’t ill. The only sign was the growing weakness, the way his right hand shook more and more every time he picked it up. Like it was hanging from a wire in the wind.
It was the thirst.
It was creeping up on him, gaining. It didn’t slacken, become a dull, unimportant need like food. It got worse and worse. Every second made the torture a little more horrible. Every noise was beginning to sound like the splashing of water to him. When the pangs were at their worst, he wished, he prayed to die quickly so it would be over with. This lying and waiting—it was torture. There wasn’t enough ideas, enough memories to fill the void. Or if there were he was too tired to think of them, too weak. Besides he couldn’t, not when the need for water was crowding everything else out.
Time dragged.
It got slower and slower as if each passing minute were attaching itself to the present ones like weights and dragging along behind, holding time back.
He was slept out. He was dizzy and half unconscious but still he was tired of sleeping. There must be something to do, he thought. Some effort to contact the world or, at least, some means of preparing for the end.
The end. Two silly words. He could say them and think them but it did no good. He couldn’t visualize himself at an end. He couldn’t actually believe he was going to die. Other people died. Not him. All his life it was that way. His uncle, his cousin, his father, his mother and, during the war, the other ones, Lindel and Foley and Moscowitz and Sergeant Jones. Never him. It not was possible. Death simply wasn’t something in his life. It was impossible that it had finally caught up with him.
Impossible. True.
He tried to sleep. He had to sleep. Waking was torture. He closed his dry aching eyes thinking that he’d give his arms and legs if someone would pour a sprinkler can of water over him until he drowned.
He couldn’t sleep. His head throbbed. He saw dark red instead of blackness and saw the outlines of the faces on the ceiling and the walls—the father bear and the old witch and Long Island.
And the city wouldn’t lie still under him.
It heaved and bucked and throbbed like a land sustaining an earthquake. Everything rumbled, the cars and busses, trucks and trains. Someone pushed a lopsided, metal-wheeled wagon down the street under his window. He heard pots and pans sliding and rattling on the wagon. The building trembled and trembled like the body of an old woman. The bed shook when people walked on the stairs or trucks thundered by. He felt each vibration flow into his left foot and run up the calf of his numbed leg. It seemed as if every noisemaker in the city were crouching with ears pricked to see when he wanted to sleep. They all made a bargain. They were a legion of plotters. Each one said—I’ll make a sudden shrill noise whenever no one else is doing it. We’ll alternate so that there’s never a moment of complete silence except once in a while to catch him off guard so that the next noise will flatten him. But we must almost never have all noises at once. We must not waste our aggravation.
And so it was. One continuous stream of gathering horns, wheels, chains, voices, footfalls, slamming doors et al. And once in a while, just for the impression, they’d all join forces and knock the stuffings out of him.
They did. They all worked together at their meticulous orchestration of din, their harmony of nerve-wracking discords. They struggled to keep him awake. And kept him awake.
For a while.
The only reason they lost the fight after a while was that he was starving and dying of thirst. And too weak to keep assimilating the waves of noise. In an hour or so his weary body sucked in rest and he slept heavily and, sluggishly, like a subject in trance, lying there on the bed, chest hardly moving.
And, somewhere in his brain, he heard a voice and wondered if it were his own voice saying — “This is Golgotha, ladies and gentlemen, on your left you will see …”
10
Five o’clock. Crush hour.
The buildings opened wide and spit out a trickle, a flow, a gush of clicking-shoed men and women. They brushed out into the warm evening air, their arms laden with books and packages and overnight work. The bobbing flow of them became a current on each sidewalk, pulsing, rushing current that swept noisily up the elevated steps, turned a corner, passed through turnstiles with a great ringing of dimes, and spinning of spokes, entered and split into two directions on the platform, gushed through doors and doors and doors, settling on mesh seats and swaying with the motion of the trains and hanging on straps, reading evening papers.
The buildings emptied out like honeycombed hives, pouring forth buzzing armies to meet the wasp attack. Under the cloud-puffed blue grey sky they rushed, the workers, the city people, hurrying back to their caves, their personal rounds again. The street was alive with them. Car doors slammed energetically, bus interiors swelled full, the
buildings drained out and out until the halls were silent but for the swishing of mops and life was running in the streets.
He heard none of it.
He was sunken in sleep, his mouth sagging open. He couldn’t get up and watch the people hurrying home. He had an excuse.
He had a bullet in his back that had ricocheted and just about cut his spine in half.
11
It was around six thirty, getting dark.
He was wide awake, gasping for air. The air blew in on his cheek and felt cool for an instant. Then when he breathed it in it felt as though he were sucking on the exhaust pipe of a furnace. He thought of the times he’d been in the steam room at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. The air tasted almost as hot there. But this wasn’t wet heat and he wasn’t covered with glistening, pouring sweat.
He was as dry as tinder.
He was sure that if someone tried to lift him he’d be light and feathery because he was all dried up. Fingers and maybe hands and feet would flake off and flutter like snow to the floor. And if this imaginary person were to shake him, his lungs and his heart and anything else not nailed down would rattle.
His head still ached, worse than ever. It felt as though it were slowly expanding like a steamblown balloon. His face felt swollen and flushed. His ears felt heavy, like hanging stone. His features were all turgid and puffy. He was sure of it. The throbbing ache pulsated through his brains and down the nape of his neck and into his spine. The lines of pain ran back and forth like hot waves breaking, running in, clutching, soaking down into the beach of his tissues, a tide of agony.
Sounds were becoming strange and disjointed in his ears.
The sounds of traffic welled up into a crashing wave of noise. Then they died down and he could hardly hear them. But he heard every word a long-suffering hero was intoning on a radio serial the drunk was hearing.
He tried to shake his head and clear it up but that only made the ache flare up into a cutting acetylene blaze that started to eat away the walls of his skull and swell his brains to double the size.
He thought he was as dry as a bone. But he felt hot tears running from his eyes. And his temperature rose up and up until it seemed that hot hands stroked and caressed him and a maudlin furnace breathed maddening affection into his face. He could have sworn someone was standing over him with a bellows full of stifling hot air and blowing it into his face and nose and mouth and ears. It was as though his body were marshaling all its forces to dispel the last amounts of moisture in his body by every means, from visible, sentient tears to unseen, unfelt, evaporation.
His pulse throbbed faster and faster. His heart disguised itself as a heavy mallet and pounded against the walls of his chest as though a carpenter were building a house there. His body trembled, his right hand kept running over his face as though he might rub the heat away and let some of that cool breeze do its soothing work.
But the heat rose and rose and as seconds were gobbled by minutes and minutes glued sixty backs together into an hour, all things became transient and tenuous. He didn’t know where he was, what room or city or world. He might have been suspended over flames in space. His mouth hung open and he gasped for air, for water. He thought he heard his voice but only heard the voice of his thoughts because his speaking voice was just a wheezing issue of steam. And his mind was saying—
Purgatory.
He writhed on the pillow. His mind perked up, goggle-eyed and started in again as he suffered—Yes sir, we’ll make water the standard of exchange. It’s the most chief thing, the mostest chiefest thing Yes sir, No I mean …
Oh please give me water, he begged whatever power there was on earth or in heaven. Lynn where did you put the water bottle I can’t see it anywhere Oh not now for Chrissakes it’s too hot You give me a drink of water though and I’ll let you Hee hee how’s that for a bargain you son of a …
I must be in the desert, he thought, because it’s so hot. Oh it’s never so hot in the city in April March September April Can I have some cool water please. Oh warm water then. Anything who’s fussy? The vision of a calendar he’d seen once in a barber shop crossed his mind. It showed a fat coppery Indian boy fishing in a rushing stream and Erick remembered how the water bubbles frothed over the stones. God do you remember the desert pictures all they ever do is have no water They keep digging in the ground and there’s no water and the hero looks haggard like in Four Feathers.
Look. If I don’t get a drink I’ll break into dust and blow away. Is that what you want to see? Don’t you realize that you need water to weigh you down or you blow away—Fooof!—like that, like chaff in the wind? He remembered a drinking contest he’d had once or did he dream that and he remembered Lynn’s sink breaking down, both of them, the one in the kitchen and the one in the bathroom and God what fun oh Ha ha ha hee hee hee he’d said and that was so funny and Lynn standing there while …
I’m not going to think about Lynn at a time like this. Damn I’m hungry how can anyone think of anything but water when he’s hungry I mean water when he’s …
A drink!
I want a goddamn ocean of it, a a a a—what’s bigger than an ocean? Two oceans!! I want three, four, five, oceans of it! Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, fifteen, a million oceans of it!!!
A thimbleful.
Seven, eight, nine. Where was I? Twenty-nine, thirty, forty, fifty. Fifty what, bananas? Fifty glasses of water all pouring down my throat.
He remembered how it felt, water. He was in the park once, in Central Park and he had his wrists in the water. When was that? Long ago. Yes! He should have jumped and gotten cool and lived underneath the water and been a waving plant damn him for an idiot anyway. Oh God I’m thirsty. He remembered a fountain in the park boy was he thirsty that day. He wanted to there was a little boy he said madame he reached out for the little Thank you madame I was about to strangle him.
The water was cool and tasteless and delicious. And Wet so Wet. God how wet! That’s what he liked about water. It was so wet. I like the taste too. And I like water because it’s cool. But what I really like about water is that it’s wet. It isn’t sweet or tart or anything but it’s just wet and it’s JUST RIGHT! YES!!
Water is right for you. They ought to have it instead of money. Say, there’s an idea, all right, all right, all I almost drowned I was with Pop and I jumped out of the inner tube and I went down into the cool cool delicious water, the wet wet water. God it was awful to sink down into the cool delicious wonderful delicious water. I’d like to line them up fifty of them fifty glasses of cold water and then I’d strip down naked see and I’d drink the first one and then I’d drink the second one and pour the third over me and Lynn could watch me too and then I’d drink the fourth and then I’d kneel on my knees and I’d drink the fifth glass of water and then I’d drink the first glass and then I’d …
He went on talking in his rasping croak for more than an hour, saying the same things over and over without noticing it, thinking that he was delivering a perfectly cohesive and intelligible monologue.
Once in a while the talking would stop even though his lips and tongue went on moving in a silent mockery of speech.
Then, after a sentence or two, he’d realize that he wasn’t making any sound even though the rambling of his thoughts went on without cessation. And, with a painful concentration he forced his vocal organs to work again and the air of his room would crackle once more with his crazy lost stream of words that clung to the theme of water and its taste and sight and touch and smell and sound.
It was past eight when his tongue lolled in his mouth, his eyes shut slowly, his head sagged and he lost consciousness, sliding down into a hot cavern of night.
* * * *
What were those two copies of his letter to Sally doing up there on the wall?
He blinked and stared unwittingly at the hall lights shining through the two paned milky glass transom.
One a copy of the other. That’s what he couldn’t understand. He knew he’d only wr
itten one letter to her, when was it, yesterday?
And now there were two. Were they breeding? There was something mystic about it. Two letters where there should be one. The fact that there was a copy side by side, was definitely symbolic. He squinted suspiciously.
Eh? That’s a mystery and I love a mystery by Carleton Morse. He tried to read the letter. He couldn’t make out the writing though, his handwriting was very unnotable. Anyway he remembered what was in it. He always remembered.
Dear Sally, it began …
12
“Oh honey, hello!”
Her voice shook with excitement. The warmth seemed to reach him all the way from her house.
“Are you coming out?” she asked.
“I’ll be right out.”