Money. He knew that was the starting point. But the working out was something else.
He sat silently, looking down at himself.
I’m even, half his brain observed. Yes, I’m very even. I have two legs on each side, I mean one. And one in the middle to satisfy the dirty purists. The third leg. Pivot of such a great to do. Fulcrum of chicanery.
He drew back his army shirt and looked at it.
There you are, he thought. There you are, caught between two beefy, lard-encased thighs. Look at you, poor, misguided macaroni, your pubic hairs aglow in the dingy bulb light. Your head adrip with the rain drops of the bladder. Safety catch of the flesh machine. Subject to the whim and fancies of your mother lust. Ho, you penis. Ho.
He let his shirt drop and looked at his hairy legs.
Those are my legs, he decided. Mine. He had to repeat it. For it was hard to believe. A man could drift away and stop up his thoughts and let them lag behind like drugged children while he wandered on ahead.
Then he was without thought and stared with bovine eyes, wondering nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing. And his body was someone else then. It did not belong to him. That underwear. It wasn’t his. It was someone else underwear. He was a watching specter, hovering and looking in the bathroom reek. He was nothing, certainly not an underwear bearing animal.
It is this, the planning went on unfettered by his fancies and rising to the top for a second. You simply must have this money. There’s no other point to argue. And the end justified the means. Therefore…
He ran a finger over his legs. The finger pushed the dark hairs out of its way. Then the hairs curled back into place. He did the same thing again.
He pressed his finger into his left leg. He pressed hard. Then he pulled away the finger and looked at the white spot. Me? He kept asking. Me?
He took hold of his penis. It was warm and soft. Incredible, he thought, here in this center of nothing, in this cavern of green plaster and hanging odors. I hold a penis, warm and malleable It must be a sign, a message from up there.
He looked up there.
There was a cockroach on the far wall, hanging head down over the bathtub.
Its quivering antennae reached out and searched, brushing threadlike over the plaster. He watched the cockroach as it walked in tiny spurts. Beastie, he thought, thing that goes bump in the night. He thought of Kafka’s hero and wondered what his reaction would be if that cockroach were to suddenly swell up and be as large as him.
The thought of it dropping heavily into the bathtub and then clambering over the side and reaching out for him with its fish pole antennae made him shudder.
His face grew hard. He swept away everything, crying out without a sound – Why do I think! I want to stop thinking!
The answer formed quickly. Some sort of answer always did.
Because you are poor, it said, because you are victimized. That is why you think on and on.
No. He had to throw over the answer. It was too pat, too encompassing. He did not trust it.
Inner machinations spreading. Inner plans creeping into light. The reasoning went on, breaking surface. Well, it was true. Wasn’t it true? Leo didn’t love him. That was a lie right from the start, a rationalization on her part to coalesce her libido with her imagined moral code. And, whether she was aware of it or not, she was out to get what she could from him.
Who else was there? Lynn? No, Lynn didn’t care anymore either. That was a thing of the past; as dead as a rusty doornail. And he didn’t like Lynn. The antipathies evened out and flattened the surface of their once intense relationship.
There was no one else.
He stared at the floor angrily and bitterly, feeling again the sense of betrayal that had some upon him with more and more frequency in the past few years. A sense that he had not been given the chance others had been given. A sense that all events conspired to defeat him.
Looking up, he snatched a piece of slimy-bottomed soap from the sink and hurled it at the cockroach.
The gold-green insect bulleted down the wall and disappeared behind the bathtub.
Bastard! He raged, stupid, futile bastard!
And his writing was no good. It was impossible. How could he write when he lived in this trap of hopes? Was it possible to write when bugs did dances on the walls, when cars and busses roared and yelled out their deafening growls twenty-four hours a day and the elevated trains came grinding and screeching into the station, disgorging people, waking him, distracting him, whipping him down the path to failure?
“No!” was the answer, half shouted in a voice hollow and dry.
No. You can’t write under such conditions. No. He said it again to emphasize it on himself and was almost content in accepting the fact. At least it made excuses easier and gave the entire problem an air of simplicity, of understandable justification. No matter what I do, he told himself, I have it coming to me. It was not possible to hope for any other good in this haven for all things bad.
He was sick of the bathroom.
He got up quickly and jerked paper from the rack. It snapped at him like an irate turtle. He wiped and dropped the paper down and flushed the toilet. Flushing this, the thought occurred to him, is like trying to make a horse’s ass fragrant by dusting it.
He unfastened the door lock and went into the dim, dust-hanging hallway.
Then at the door to his room…
He stopped, his heart suddenly pounding.
No seeming reason. The joints were invisible. What had formed the links was unknown to him.
But, abruptly, he thought of the old man in the pawn shop. The old man with his money in a lead box. The crouched ugly old man with the hair-sprouting wart on his chin. The old man who would offer him nine dollars for the watch his mother gave him.
Money and the old man.
Quickly rising now, a strange excitement possessed him as he went in his room and locked himself in. Like some trembling conspirator who had suddenly deduced the method by which to overthrow the tyrant’s throne.
How fantastic! He thought elatedly. How utterly fantastic that I never thought of it before.
He walked quickly to the bed and sat down, leaned back against the head that was like a prison window. He heard an elevated train come grating to a halt and there was thunder far away.
You think in layers.
That was it.
Incredible that he’d never realized it before. You think in layers and each layer you build up or have built up for you makes you more a victim of society’s mores. Each added layer weighs you down more, makes you more vacillating and will-less.
But they wear away. His eyes were bright and almost feverish as he understood it at last; this fabulous secret. Yes, that was the weakness – they wear away! You lived like this, you were forced into grasping path and soon the layers wore away.
The bottom layer was the animal.
He’d almost reached it. He had just stripped off another layer. Sitting there in the bathroom, the last remnants of it had fallen off. Through the last week, month, year, he had been working it off, thread by thread, all unseen, until now, when he was walking from the bathroom to his room, the last fragment of morality had fluttered down and died.
And he realized for the first time that a man who had not should not cry out – pity!
A man who had not should take by any means, fair or foul.
Fair or foul!
The words suddenly enraged him and his face contorted into a bestial snarl.
Words! He thumped the mattress with his fist and almost gagged in fury. It was almost frightening how quickly and powerfully temper came to him now.
Fair or foul, bah! What idiot glue kept that asininity in his skull? What inane retention was this, this never-ending devotion to the black and white? Why had he not purged himself of words long before this? Had he not seen the light, the better way? Was he not committed to action now instead of words?
That was the question, newborn and crowding.
br />
Never mind.
He calmed himself. Even in rage, he could not choke all reason lest his plans fall through. It’s all right, he told himself. Better late than never. A cliché but true. That was the charm of clichés. If they became clichés they were usually estimable if not pluperfect generalizations.
It was all simple, simple and direct. That too was the charm of the new layer he’d reached. It made all things straight and simple. If you needed, said the new rule, you took. If you hungered, you ate.
And if you hated…
He lay there shivering excitedly as the church bells rang out hollow throated above the cacophony of traffic and the blowing spatter of the beginning rain.
Ding dong ding dong. Ding dong ding dong. Pause. One… two… three… four (Lost beneath the screech of someone’s brakes)… five… six…
Seven o’clock, getting dark.
He raised up on an elbow and looked out through the window.
Far away he saw a building outlined against the dull, grayish sky. He saw a tiny water tank against the sky too and thought of the plow that stood against the sunset in Willa Cather’s book.
Below the water tank was a single light in one of the building windows. It is the engineer, said his casual brain, and he is working overtime in order to complete the blueprints for that highway which runs through the tiles in the bathroom. He saw the man in his shirtsleeves, thin lipped, drawing and checking, elbow deep in cluttering slide rules and T-squares and triangles and half-moon protractors.
Lowering his gaze, he watched an elevated train pull into the station. He saw lights in the windows, saw blurs and decided they were people. He squinted. They were people. He watched them interestedly. The world was new again. With each new layer, the outlook changed. And the world was reborn, repainted in different colors by a new, more interesting landlord.
Lights from windows on Third Avenue reflected on the roof of the elevated platform, forming blurry, fluted gold streaks. They reminded him of the wristbands on the pawnshop watches.
He smiled darkly and fell back on the pillow.
How simple.
He shook his head and chuckled softly. How very simple. How could he have missed it all these months, through this last year of trial? How could he have overlooked the obvious, the insensately tabooed masterpieces of will?
No matter. He had it now.
He heard another train rumble into the station. It shrieked out as it stopped and set his heart to violent beating. He felt it thudding his body against the bed.
Afraid? Asked his enraging mind.
No! he screamed back defensively, I’m not afraid! But screw your courage to the sticking point – the phrase emerged from the library of quotations in his mind.
He shut his eyes and thought of the pawn shop.
He thought of the little dumpy display case in front of the shop, like a glass island, filled with shiny cameras staring out a passers-by through unblinking eyes; lensed cyclops
He thought of the windows; hanging gardens of saxophones and clarinets and trumpets and guitars; music never to be heard. Typewriters, fishing reels, grindstones and barometers, violins and shotguns.
And the watches. Especially, he thought of the watches. Rows and rows of them hanging head down on their velvet beds with their shiny expansion bracelets or their cheap new leather bands.
The old man had wanted his watch there.
In that morgue for time pieces. For nine dollars. The watch his own mother had paid seventy five dollars for when he got out of the army.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his heart still thudding slowly and heavily.
My mother is dead, he told himself again and again, working himself into an even greater pitch of self justification. There is no place to go. There is no place to rest and there is no escape. I must do for myself what must be done. No one else cares.
Very well then!
His teeth clicked together and fury at a world shook him. He shut his eyes, lips tight, hands clenched at his sides. I’ll kill the old man, he thought suddenly, Oh God, how I’d love to do it. I’d like to be like Raskolnikov, I’d like to hide an axe underneath my coat and go into the shop and corner the old man and chop open his shiny, greasy head and cut up his brains into mincemeat!
Imagination without control. He trembled on the bed. Oh God, my temper! He cried within, I have to keep it checked! I can’t do anything if I lose my temper.
But the brief battle was quickly ended. He let himself go and lay shivering and smiling coldly and murderously.
“Why, of course,” he said.
And shuddered at the studied sound of venom in his voice. For a brief moment he was a complete and frightening stranger to himself. But then, like a well-taught actor, he caught up the script for his new role and became Hyde and relished it.
Of course, he thought. The layers above are gone. They had fallen off the old, dirty robes. He was free of them, next to naked, cruel and powerful with a new strength of clear detachment, armed with the might of trapped animals and raging, desperate men.
He drew in a shaking breath that made his chest throb.
Tonight, he pledged.
But I’ll be smart. I won’t murder the old man. No, that would be foolish. Why murder when it is such a great thing in the code? It puts a spotlight on the incident and, in the blackness, you might be picked out.
That’s it. It was decided. He’d think of killing the old man and enjoy the thinking. But he wouldn’t do it, actually. Beside the simple perils of it, he didn’t think it would be good for him. Not killing. It might cause a reaction in him that he wouldn’t be prepared for. He might break down, become panic-stricken. There was no point in that. It was the money he wanted anyway. He’d just lie here and think of chopping up the old man and driving the sharp blade edge over and over into his…
Again. The trembling. Almost, the sexual excitation. An ecstasy of committing unpunished violence. His organ was hard. His hand clutched eagerly at it, taut bent pieces of bone and flesh, white and bloodless. He began to tear open his pants.
He commanded himself then—no! I must not! It weakens resolve, it makes me think too much. It builds up the layers again. Oh, how clever a method nature had evolved for building up dispassion. He caught her at the game. It made him chuckle. He took his hands away. And went back to his plan.
Anyway, he thought, the old man will wish he were dead when his money is taken away. Yes, of course. What was there precious in the old man’s life that was worth the taking? Life must have been a hideous rack for the old man. He would be better off dead. Why should he be the instrument of release?
The case is clear, he told himself. But, inside, wondered if he were rationalizing, backing away from it.
No! It was true. There was no point in killing. As he had already calculated it was too great a risk.
He rolled on his stomach and laughed; a short brutal laugh that tore from his throat and sprayed itself around and hung in dripping vindictiveness from the walls.
He turned his head and, in the twilight dimness looked at the rose.
It was still new and fresh.
He had found it that afternoon. He had just come from the post office where he’d been buying some stamps. He saw the rose in the gutter, like a splash of blood it seemed at first. A crimson splash of blood.
He picked it up. It was broken off and its sap was oozing from the green stump. He looked at it, instinctively, smelled it. He didn’t notice the people watching. He had come to the point where he always walked alone.
The rose smelled sweet. The perfume of it went deep into his head. The petals were all curled around the center as though they concealed from sight some precious thing, embracing it in their soft, gentle folds.
Underneath, like the thick strands of a hula skirt, were the green fronds. And glued by spit or sap or hope was a tiny piece of decorative leaf. He had touched it, the delicate green needles all like silken threads and green lace.
“Beautiful,” he had whispered. And, somewhere in him, there was a tiny sense of resentment. For, through the months and years he had been building himself a picture of the world, painted in hues of dull unpleasant grey. And this sudden brightness, this sudden dash of beauty in the overall squalor seemed to destroy his picture, gave it falsity and showed the lie.
He took it to his room. The beauty of it overcame the inner feeling of dislike. It was instinctive. It was natural to take a flower to your room for decoration. So he had taken it and put water in the glass on the window table and set the rose to standing there in the sunlight.
Now he was looking at it.
What is it? he mused, once again caught up in the search for meanings and connections. What is it beyond a rose and a bit of delicate lacework? Why did I find it? Does it mean anything? When there is no one to give it to? came the thought. For what is a flower if there is no one to give it to?
He bit his lips and fought back the tears that, suddenly, wanted to fall.
“No!” he said hoarsely. And almost jumped up to hurl the glass and flower on the rug and crush them with raging feet.
Instead, he closed his eyes tightly, so tightly that it contorted his face, driving lines along the edges of his eyes and making ugly ridges and valleys on each side of his nose bridge.
Forget those thoughts, he commanded himself. And, once more, felt a strong resentment toward the rose which had broken his pattern and hated himself for bringing it up as an evidence of the broken pattern.
There is no love or beauty in the world! He demanded that it was the truth. The world is hard and cruel and mean. It is empty and fruitless. It is a neon sign glowing out its blatant insults to the night. It is a drunk lying dead in the gutter with the rain soaking into his white, flaccid face. It is hate and corruption and greed and hunger and thirst!
He lay very still, trying vainly to empty his mind of sickening thoughts, all thoughts. God, if only there were Ex-Lax for the brain, his mind ran on, some cathartic that would purge the aching swollen mind of all its stored up dung of thought. If only you could think it out and pull the cord and watch a whirlpool suck it down and be free to fill your mind again with food, with better, cleaner food.