Is that woman dead? Am I dead? A fine thing if this is the place. May I lie with her? May she be the grave I bury myself in? His half sleeping brain tossed out questions like firecrackers exploding in a stove.
He got up and walked away.
A little white-backed squirrel was probing under a tree for a nut. How do you know he’s looking for a nut? Maybe he’s digging a grave for his mistress who he has just bitten to death.
He sat down suddenly and watched the squirrel eat his nut.
It crouched on the grass and held it in the tiny grey paws. It crunched away so fast it seemed that a policeman was looking over his shoulder, getting ready to take it away. The greedy, beady eyes rolled like marbles. Razor teeth shredded the nut and the fluffy tail stood up motionless and magnificent.
He looked around. Three small men were sneaking up on the squirrel. They had their hands extended. Their fingers were tensed and white and ugly. Their eyes shone. There was sweat on their faces. They wanted to catch the squirrel.
He watched in rising horror.
Closer and closer they came. Was it blind? Couldn’t it hear those big clumsy leather shoes? Couldn’t it sense the three ugly hunters reaching for him?
The squirrel crouched and chewed like a million.
Suddenly one of the men lunged.
He got a hold of the tail. But the squirrel pulled away with a squeak and bounced across the path and scuttled up a tree. Erick sank back in relief. The air was filled with wild laughter. The three men brushed themselves off and marched away in pride.
He watched their receding backs. He wanted to empty a machine gun into them. Like the dreams he had where he held the submachine gun at his waist and mowed men down as they charged him. That’s what he wanted to do—shoot down those men.
Well, what of it. The squirrel is alive. Sitting on a limb with its heart pounding against grey fur. Safe and sound. Free to ferret for more nuts.
He got up. I’m going. Goodbye squirrel. Till we meet again. I wonder if there are squirrels in heaven or hell.
He came to a bridge with benches along the side. He sat down. He leaned back and stared sickly at the ground, feeling his stomach turn over and over.
A man in a gaudy sportshirt with pictures of birds on it walked up and sat down. The man extended a dirty, broken-nailed hand.
“I want to shake your hand,” he said, “Yes, sir. How do you do sir. My name is Fred B. Sampson, yes, sir.”
Words heard in a fog. The breath nauseated him, liquored and sweetish.
“Now you see those pigeons? I used to train pigeons. Yes, sir.”
The man belched in his face, exploding a rank cloud in his lungs.
“Yes, sir, I used to train them birds. Smart? Yes, they are smart. You can’t find nothing smarter. They used to … they … they ate out of my hands! I whistle to ‘em and they just come. Yes, sir. You have no idea. Oh, yes. Don’t you forget it never. No, sir. You just whistle and they come!”
He watched the man with sick eyes. He thought of what it would be like to be a stranger and for the man to be saying—My name is Albert Linstrom, yes, sir. For it to be his father drunk and babbling. The man was weaving before his eyes. His face kept blurring, running like wax.
The man was signaling invisible birds.
He was whistling to them. He took invisible crumbs out of his pockets and the invisible birds came up to him, crawled up his legs and had a bite to eat out of his palms. He looked at them fondly.
“Shall I chase ya? No, I won’t chase ya. No, sir. You know me (Hock-tooey!) You know me. I whistle and you come and eat bread from me.”
Suddenly the man jumped up and began walking away rapidly, his thin legs moving like pistons.
“Come on birds! Come on! There’s a homer. Tweet. You’d never believe it. They have a mind. I know. Don’t forget it never.”
The man disappeared around a bend in the path. He looked at the spot. It had been a ghost. His stomach rumbled.
Mothers and children passed. Ma ma buy me this. Ma ma buy me that.
He heard a merry-go-round.
He got up and walked up the path and around the bend. It was horrible music in his ears. It surrounded him. The large periphery was turning slowly, getting faster and faster. The pipe organ played. A military drum beat crashed in guillotine rhythm with the blatant organ voice.
Uninterested children were rising and sinking on the dead horses. A dull-eyed man sat in a gaudy yellow seat, legs crossed, dispassionate. All of them wheeling around in a stupid circle. No one smiled. Is it so sad? Where is the picture of laughing children on a carousel?
It was slowing down now. The mothers smiled. No one else did. Not the bored ticket seller or the tired looking operator. Not the children. The military drum beat rolled on, sickening. Sounding like machine guns, or regulated thunder or … my God, horses hooves.
Stupid little wooden horse in gay pose. Galloping high. Green and orange saddle. Hard eyes locking at the grey slats around the outside. A mane of wood. Tassels and gay colors. Death and circular embalming. Who carved you? Some madman in Rome or some machine in Newark? Who painted your beady black eyes? You are a revolting sight. How many grubby rears have profaned your already profaned lumber?
He moved away. He passed a little boy heaving an empty crackerjack box at the pigeons.
Now, suddenly, from the merry-go-around came swelling strains of Beethoven.
He stopped short, breathless and stood silently, listening.
It ended. The brief magic was kicked aside by the organ’s bleating. Then the coarse sounds died away as he walked off.
He entered a rest room and urinated. He leaned against the wall. It was cool tile. Is this the pause that refreshes John or is this the pause that refreshes? The stench of urine, perfumed soap and cigar smoke began to nauseate him. Suddenly he felt his stomach move of itself and he vomited in the urinal. There was no one around. He wiped off his mouth with his soaked handkerchief. The smell ballooned in his nostrils. His teeth clenched and he sobbed in outraged sickness. Then he turned and stumbled back into the sunlight. He wanted to die.
He walked out into the sunken walk beside the road. There were grey stone walls on both sides. He walked along slowly. The cars and trucks rushed by. The gas fumes filled his nose and mouth and throat. He choked. He felt the hot eating sun on his back.
An old bent woman in black passed him. He looked at her. It was a different one. The cars whined past and he coughed again and again from the exhaust fumes in his throat.
He went into a tunnel. It was full of the roar and the hot breath of vehicles, it was dark. He stopped and closed his eyes.
This is hell. I know it is. Dark and full of foul fumes and roaring in the ears. Furies rushing by in the dark and passing into the universe. Frightening din. Dead leaves scuttling through the darkness like old women hugging their capes to themselves in a windstorm. They brushed by his ankles and moved into sunlit heaps outside.
He could. A few steps. A darkness and roar. Sudden crushing. Flying through the air. Still and peace. He felt his muscles straining, straining to push him forward into the street. Breaths poured from his widened nostrils. He whimpered. Death.
He turned with a shudder and ran out of the tunnel. He slowed down and walked again. It was dirty and vapid and noisy. He wanted quiet and beauty. Soothing water. A gentle rope. A casual pill. A refreshing razor. A sniff of gas.
He stopped again and found himself shaking violently and thought he was going to be sick to the stomach again. A truck roared past and he screamed as loud as he could. And again. But there was no truck.
He walked on again, quickly and stepping out onto Central Park West, he stumbled along with the gait of a sick old man.
He turned in and sank down on a bench. It was getting late. Mother would be crying now. Sitting in the chair in the living room, crying softly, her body twitching with the pain every once in a while. And Grace would be in the kitchen making lunch. And her husband would be there and he
r children.
He would never go back. He would never live there again.
A young willowy girl passed in front of him. She wore a thin white blouse. Her nipples pressed against the silk over her jogging breasts.
His body lurched on the bench suddenly. Scream! Howled his mind. Scream! Attack her! Rip off her clothes! Hit her! Kick her! Squeeze the light from her eyes!
He fell back against the bench, breathing short, ugly breaths. His mind chanted on. Sex crazy girl. Every one of you. Yes, all of you! Flaunting your eager bodies at us. Then shrinking with distaste when you have driven us poor strangers into madness. Ramming your desire down our throats and choking us! Here I sit starving and yet I can still look at a woman’s body and get excited. But the excitement is not sweet. It is a sordid, a merciless hunger. Taking the place of food, it eats at the organs and presses the soul into a pitiful lump. I am a wild hungry animal sitting on a bench on Central Park West and I am planning to …
He got up and ran into the park again, not trying to fight the hot tears that pushed from his eyes. He felt the heat crushing him down like fiery hands, trying to flatten him into the ground. They beat down without pity.
He ran along the path from side to side and felt sobs tear at his chest. He ran off the path and up a hill and tumbled onto the grass. He looked down through black waves and saw the cars whizzing by. And tears of hot futility surged from his eyes and fell in splashes on the grass. His body shook with sobs. The black waves were wet and dripping now. He was totally alone, sick of having the world slap him down for every move he made. Oh God, where is the water and the peace. He lay his head on the warm grass and cried himself to sleep.
He woke up when it was still light. The sun wasn’t shining overhead. It hung just over the trees.
He was cramped and stiff. He stood up shakily and stumbled down the hill to the road. The cars were still moving. All going somewhere. He was going somewhere. Once.
His eyes were heavy. His body was numb. The hunger had lost its sharp bite. It was a hollow sickness. He was a shell. If he added weight to the void it would not affect him. It was not nourishment anymore. It was only packing to keep the fragile articles from breaking. He wanted to break them.
Then, as he crossed the road, he saw the water.
He stared at the dull, shifting glitter as he walked on like a sleepwalker. The people were ghosts, the sounds were far and fantastic. Only the water was real.
More statues passed him. Daniel Webster stepped aside so he could walk by. “Now and forever, one and inseparable,” he whispered through metal lips.
He hurried now, breathless, as though he would find something there. At the water, only a little way now. He moved across a field, smelling fresh grass blood from the wounded blades.
And stopped at the edge, stopped dead.
Darkly stagnant there. Too many people. Too shallow. And the rush of horror that indecision brought. Was there any doubt? There was nothing. Yet the idea of actually going in there.
He should wait until it was dark. Then, with shadows to hide behind, he could do it. That was the way, he told himself. He reasoned. Wait for night.
He stepped back from the water’s edge. Almost gratefully. And sank to the ground, cowed by the will of his inner mind.
He thought of night. Of himself slipping off his school ring and watch and placing them on the cool grass for some fortunate to find. He thought of taking off his clothes and standing naked under the city’s leering eyes. Of striding clean and silent into the water and swimming in tired, grateful strokes to the middle of the lake. Of relaxing his limbs and letting the waters cover his head and, sensuously, caress his body into a sweet slumber. Feeling its cool fingers on his aching body.
He stared at the boats on the water. The sun was going down. The sky was red and blue. No white? The clouds. Memories of the gallant flag. Hanging in a hot wind with people scurrying beneath its wordless folds.
He crawled to the water’s edge. He lay on his stomach and put his hands in the water. It washed over his hot wrists and soothed them.
Then, without noticing it, without even thinking, he pulled up his wristwatch so it wouldn’t get wet.
* * * *
And, late that afternoon, he went home and they told him that his mother was in the hospital, that she had collapsed a few minutes after he left the house.
Sick and frightened, he rushed to the hospital. And the people at the hospital told him that his mother was dead.
6
His heart beats slower and slower.
The beats are heavy and dead. With every beat his eyes seem to cloud and the room runs like water and melts before his gaze.
Tears are coming. But slowly. They are the last. He can feel his eyelids stiffening. It is almost impossible for him to close his eyes.
His mouth is shriveled, his tongue is shriveled. He feels the lips being drawn back slowly from his teeth. He feels the gradual steady formation of an idiot smile on his sallow, dried face. He keeps trying to take off his clothes. He feels so hot and rattling that he is like a dried up fruit with the seeds loose inside. He wants to tear off his clothes. But his hand is too weak. It lacks any reflexes. It twitches but it moves the wrong way. It lies motionless, a knotted, white gnarl of bone and tissue and skin.
His heart is a slow, slow tympani beat in his hollow chest. He is sure that all there is in his chest is his heart hanging from a thin wire and thudding slowly and heavily, making the room swell and ebb, swell and ebb.
The crackling in his ears is music.
It is all the music he ever heard in his life. It is great symphonies and tone poems and overtures and concertos. It is an immaculate synthesis of all the music in his life. It shifts, blends, from the Pastoral Symphony to the Mephisto Waltz to the Ave Maria to The Rites of Spring.
None of it is clear. None of the melodies or harmonies stand out. The orchestra is playing in too huge a hall and there are too many echoes and they are playing too many things at the same time. But he recognizes them all. Later he realizes that there is not only one orchestra but two orchestras, three, four of them as a matter of fact, five maybe. All playing different things. Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring and the Eroica and The Stars and Stripes Forever all howling and bludgeoning at his brain.
* * * *
He sees an arm lying there.
Oh my God, his brain clicks, manna. I’ll bite it and drink the blood.
The arm moves obligingly. It shudders. It is held on flimsy threads. It plunks down in front, on his chest. He parts his yellow, filmy teeth. The arm slides in closer like a monster slithering into its lair.
He digs hot teeth into the wrist.
It is hard and bony. He bites harder, enraged at the resistance, offended that there is no blood spurting into his mouth like tomato juice from a fountain.
The owner of the wrist is somewhere in the room. Erick hears him resisting violently, crying in agony. He chuckles at that. I’ll get it before he knows what hit him, the idea looms up mushroomlike. Anyway the owner of the arm is too far away to effect him. He bites harder.
There is no blood.
He spits out the arm and glares at it vengefully, through shrunken, red-veined eyes, dried-up, motionless eyes.
He snarls. He turns his head away. Get that damn dried up piece of crap out of here! He orders the stranger who keeps whimpering.
* * * *
He tries to tear his clothes off because he is so hot and dry and rattling. His palsied hand tears at buttons and buckle and zipper. It cannot concentrate though. It tears at a button and then slides to the belt, then falls on the zipper, then back to another button. It can’t make up its mind.
Beside, everything is padlocked, double padlocked.
* * * *
The tears stop flowing.
His eyelids stiffen. His eyes stay wide open even when his brain is dead asleep. He cannot wink or blink. He looks at the ceiling with a wide-eyed winkless stare, his eyeballs bulging, hard and dry.
* * * *
He is thinking of himself throwing water away.
He remembers every time he threw away a glass of water. He thinks he remembers. He remembers breaking a bottle of water in Grace’s kitchen. It shattered on the tiles and the cold water ran, wasted over the colored linoleum. And he had said, Oh I’m sorry and
mopped it up.
He distinctly remembers running the mop over the floor, blotting up and wasting an entirely full bottle of water.
He recalls walking by a hundred park fountains without stopping. He tries very hard to analyze why he hadn’t stopped at every fountain he’d ever passed in his life and drank water down until it filled his chest and his throat and ran out of his mouth.
He remembers walking by fountains at the beach. He remembers only drinking a little of it once in a while and saying—I don’t want to drink much because of this terrible heat.
What a fool!
It is completely unrewarding to investigate thought. There is absolutely no sense to it at all. There is no understanding of why he hadn’t drunk in every drop his body would hold, every moment of the day, every day of the year. His brain just will not accept any argument. There isn’t any. All he knows is that everytime he ignored water, snubbed water, treated water disdainfully was a mistake, a horrible witless mistake.
He remembers not going into the ocean after he ate. You’ll get a cramp mother always said. And he said, Yes mother—and, instead of going to swim in the cold wet ocean he would lie in the hot sun. Yes! Actually lie in the blazing, drying sun when he could have been in the water, letting it soak him. Letting it soften his flesh, cool him. He could even have drunk it. Why, in all the times he went swimming in oceans and lakes and pools did it never occur to him to drink up the water?
There isn’t any answer. He knows that, beyond a doubt. It had just been unutterable stupidity on his part. Blind vacuity that’s all.
He remembers washing in water. Taking baths in water. Taking showers in water.
And, every time, the water ran down the drain and was lost! My God what a fool he’d been, what a wasteful, blind and moronic fool!