He ran down the stairs and into the vestibule of the building. The doorman was standing looking out into the street, the glass doors tightly shut against the wind and the cold.
Michael Kirxby ran past him, head down, arms close to his body. He heard the man say something, but it was lost in the rush of wind and chill as he jammed through onto the sidewalk.
Terror enveloped him. He ran toward the corner and turned toward the darkness. If he could just get into the darkness, where he couldn’t be found, then he was safe. Perhaps he would be safe.
He rounded the corner. A woman, head down against the wind, bumped into him. They rebounded and in the vague light of the street lamp looked into each other’s faces.
“Hello,” said Marcie.
Opium
Introduction
This one was written to be read on television.
I’ve done so on two occasions: first, on an NBC interview show called At One With…, with the estimable Keith Berwick as host; the second time I read it over the Canadian Broadcasting Company during the go Minutes Live show, then-hosted by Peter Gzowski.
Bringing the spoken word to the tube-enslaved masses.
No, I’m not going to enter another crazed screed against television and its manifest horrors. Consult my last book for everything I care to say on that dreary topic.
Then why does he tell us all this?
I tell you all this because “Opium” was intended as a bit of guerrilla warfare. It is a story that says only one thing: we are entertaining ourselves into oblivion.
I can’t stand it, we say. I work my ass off all day, and I just want to get away from it all, we say. I don’t want any heavy stuff, I just want to be entertained, we say. And so we spend the major part of our nonworking hours escaping the Real World, the pragmatic universe, if you will. Whether it be fast sex, fundamentalist religion, cheap novels, empty-headed movies, booze, dope, sword’n’sorcery fantasy, endless television-watching, fast food or miniature golf, we run from dealings with the Real World like ants from Raid.
So I wrote this story to say that Entropy tries to maintain the status quo in order to keep the system working. And that permits of very little outlawry, very little berserk behavior. And from the desperados, whether they be Einstein or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, come the strength and the upheaval that moves the world forward toward light and reason.
And the “opium of the people” (as Marx called religion) has changed through the centuries. Now it’s all the elements noted above that keep people distracted and dumb. And that includes the deification of sports. (Quoting from another great philosopher, Howard Cosell, who said: “Sports are the Toy Department of life… the primary means for sustaining delusion and illusion. “)
This story, intended as fifth column warfare against the medium of television, to be read on television, says simply that if the Real World isn’t interesting enough to command the attention of the lives it contains, then maybe the Real World will alter itself magically to keep us away from Taco Bell and Laverne & Shirley.
This moment of softness has been brought to you by Zee Toilet Tissue.
Anne Marie Stebner placed the tip of the double-edged razor blade against her left wrist, just below the place in her palm where the life line turned toward the thumb on the Mount of Venus. At the precise spot where the life line ended, she slid the blade into the skin, and began drawing it deeply down the length of her arm toward the inside of her elbow. She had heard that if one really wanted to slash her wrists, she should open the arm lengthwise, not across the veins. It was too easy for them to hold it together and tape it up if one cut across. Up the arms was the way to do it, if one was serious about suicide.
File clerk in a large recording company, what blind dates would call “really plain, but does it like a rabbit,” thirty-one years old without even the usual range of dull prospects, she had wakened several hours earlier to find the grad student she had met at the party last night already cleared out. He had not, thoughtfully, used her lipstick to write his name and phone number on the bathroom mirror. But he had left a pile of wet towels, corpselike, draped over the tub.
She was quite serious about the double-edged razor blade. As she pulled the blade up her arm, encountering only minor resistance, she looked out the front window of her duplex. On the front lawn, at least five of the Seven Dwarfs were planting a beautiful bonsai tree.
She smiled at the way they worked so industriously, scooping out the dirt and placing it neatly on a tarpaulin, how Grumpy removed the wrappings around the roots, and how Dopey clapped his hands as the hole was dug. She knew she was hallucinating, possibly shock, probably from loss of blood, but she felt she would like to go out there to die, out where the sun was shining. It had not been shining when she’d crawled out of bed. In fact, it had been raining.
She walked to the door, leaving dark stains on the cheap carpet, and opened the door to the front yard. The razor blade lay on the coffee table. If necessary, she could do the other arm later. She didn’t think it would be necessary.
As she approached them, they looked up at her.
“Good morning!” Doc said, giving her a big smile. “Do you like it? I think it’s about a hundred years old.”
“It’s really lovely,” Anne Marie said. “But why are you planting it here, on Sunday morning?”
Bashful came up to her, and took her by her right arm, the arm that was not bleeding. “Brightening up the real world for you, Miss Stebner,” he said.
She was startled: she could feel his tiny hand in hers. She could smell the faint, not unpleasant odor of their work-sweat. She could hear the ratchety sound of their spades in the dirt. Was this the way it was when one was on the way out?
She was led by the dwarf to a place right beside the bonsai, which Sleepy and Grumpy had put in the hole. Dopey was packing in the earth around the bole. She reached out and touched the tree. It was real.
“Have a nice day,” Doc said, and began gathering up the planting tools.
“You’ve wasted your time,” she said. “I’m dying; can’t you see that?”
One by one they came to her and hugged her, as she sat there, and then they went away. In a few moments, with the intricate hieroglyphics of the bonsai’s branches before her eyes, she felt faint, lay back, and became unconscious.
She sat up in the hospital bed, her arm taped to the elbow, and listened to the young intern. The married couple who had just moved into the other side of the duplex had found her on the front lawn, as they emerged to go for Sunday brunch. She had not seen them yet, so she had not been able to ask how they had saved her; she had been certain it was impossible to save someone who had cut lengthwise rather than across. But they had saved her, and she sat up in the hospital bed, and the intern tried to be supportive.
“Everybody wants to get away from the world,” he said. “Whether it’s dope or booze or religion or television or quick sex or trashy novels, everybody wants to run away. We all want to be entertained all the time. And when it doesn’t work, when none of it is enough, we try to kill ourselves to escape.”
She didn’t think he understood just how lonely she was.
“The real world is terrific,” the young intern said. “I promise you, Anne Marie, it’s wonderful. People are always complaining, ‘Oh, I need to get away, I need to relax, I don’t want to think about it.’ If they turn on the tube and it’s some program about current events they rush to change the channel to get some silly rerun of a sitcom. We spend ninety percent of our lives escaping. If you really, truly, completely deal with the real world… it’s fascinating!”
She asked him to go away. She said she wanted to sleep, to get away from it all. So he left, but she didn’t sleep. She started to turn on the television set high on the wall across from her bed, but a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye claimed her attention. Out there in the sky, turning in tight maneuvers, a Sopwith Camel was having a dogfight with a large green and gray pterodactyl.,
She knew it was really happening out there, because from the angle at which she lay she could see other windows in the wing of the hospital to her right, and there were people leaning out and pointing at the sky.
For a long time she watched the marvelous ballet of wood-and-fabric airplane and Cretaceous flying reptile.
She was waiting on the sidewalk outside the recording company for the married executive to pick her up for their date. He had called it their “illegal tryst” and she had not liked the way his face pulled up on one side when he smiled like that; but she had been empty of plans for that night, and it was something to do not to be alone. The married executive had, promised her dinner and a movie. They were going to see a very popular space war movie that everyone said was the return of entertainment. It was something to do.
As she stood there at the curb, a 1941 Packard pulled up and a woman rolled down the window. It was a green Packard, highly polished, as though someone who loved it had waxed it endlessly. “Anne Marie,” the woman called from the car.
She walked over. It was her mother.
Her father was driving. The scent of pipe tobacco came from inside the car. “We thought we might have a picnic, like the old times, just the three of us,” her mother said. “Would you like to come along?”
She began to cry, even as she nodded and her mother reached back to unlock the rear door. She got inside and sat very quietly beside the picnic basket. The Packard thrummed to life, and pulled away.
Anne Marie Stebner’s mother and father had been dead for eleven years. It was a wonderful picnic.
Sailing the catamaran through the reefs of sapphire rocks, she made for the island. The wind smelled of freshly mowed grass and carried with it the faint tinkling of wind chimes.
“If it gets too lonely out here,” she said aloud, “perhaps I’ll start a fast-food franchise. Something with Lebanese food, maybe.”
As she spoke, a group of golden-tanned men and women emerged from behind a dune on the island, and waved at her, waved her in through the precious reefs.
“Or I can always rent a television set somewhere,” she said, smiling broadly. Several of the golden people produced oddly shaped musical instruments and began playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.” It had always been her favorite tune.
She tacked against the wind, and headed in to the island. Reality was fighting back. If the real world was too horrible for the lives it served, then the real world would alter itself. Anne Marie Stebner beached the catamaran and ran up the sand toward the golden island dwellers.
“Hi,” she called to them. “I’ve always wanted to live in a place” like this, I just didn’t know where to go to find it. What’s happening around here?”
So they told her. And she could not, in her wildest dreams, have believed anything could be that terrifically interesting. But it was. There in the real world.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus
Introduction
I was dragged, kicking and screaming, on a tour through the lives of two women, once upon a time.
It was one of the most awful experiences of all time.
Including the Spanish Inquisition, the murder of Garcia Lorca, the genocide of the Brazilian indians, the crucifixion of Spartacus’ army of slaves, the sinking of the Titanic, the fire-bombing of Dresden and the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. This experience, I tell you, contained elements of all of the above, plus a few personal nasties that make me shudder when I think of them.
The experience does not, in any but one isolated reference, appear in this story. But it was that long night that inspired the writing.
Further, deponent sayeth not.
Yuccchhhh.
THIS IS ABOUT Brubaker, who is a man, but who might as easily have been a woman; and it would have been the same, no difference: painful and endless.
She was in her early forties and crippled. Something with the left leg and the spine. She went sidewise, slowly, like a sailor leaving a ship after a long time at sea. Her face was unindexed as to the rejections she had known; one could search randomly and find a shadow here beneath the eyes that came from the supermarket manager named Charlie; a crease in the space beside her mouth, just at the left side, that had been carved from a two nights’ association with Clara from the florist shop; a moistness here at the right temple each time she recalled the words spoken the morning after the night with the fellow who drove the dry cleaner’s van, Barry or Benny. But there was no sure record. It was all there, everywhere in her face.
Brubaker had not wanted to sleep with her. He had not wanted to take her home or go to her home, but he had. Her apartment was small and faced out onto a narrow court that permitted sunlight only during the hour before and the hour following high noon. She had pictures from magazines taped to the walls. The bed was narrow.
When she touched him, he felt himself going away. Thinking of warm places where he had rested on afternoons many years before; afternoons when he had been alone and had thought that was not as successful a thing to be as he now understood it to be. He did not want to think of it in this way, but he thought of himself as a bricklayer doing a methodical job. Laying the bricks straight and true.
He made love to her in the narrow bed, and was not there. He was doing a job, and thought how unkind and how unworthy such thoughts seemed to be… even though she would not know he was away somewhere else. He had done this before, and kindness was something he did very well. She would feel treasured, and attended, and certainly that was the least he could do. Her limp, her sad and lined face. She would think he was in attendance, treasuring her. He had no needs of his own, so it was possible to give her all that without trembling.
They both came awake when an ambulance screamed crosstown just beneath her window, and she looked at him warmly and said, “I have to get up early in the morning, we’re doing inventory at the office, the files are really in terrible shape.” But her face held a footnote expression that might have been interpreted as You can stay if you want, but I’ve been left in beds where the other side grows cool quickly, and I don’t want to see your face in the morning with that look that tells me you’re trying to work up an excuse to leave so you can rush home to take the kind of shower that washes the memory of me off you. So I’m giving you the chance to go now, because if you stay it means you’ll call tomorrow sometime before noon and ask if I’d like to have dinner and see an early movie.
So he kissed her several times, on the cheeks and once—gently—on the mouth, with lips closed; a treasuring kiss. And he left her apartment.
The breeze blew gently and coolly off the East River, and he decided to walk down past Henderson Place to sit in the park. To give himself time to come back from those far places. He felt partially dissolved, as if in sending himself out of that apartment he had indulged in some kind of minimal astral projection. And now that he was ready to receive himself again, there was a bit of his soul missing, left behind in her bed.
He had a tiny headache, the finest point of pain, just between and above his eyes, somewhere pierced behind the hard bone over the bridge of his nose. As he walked toward the park, he rubbed the angles of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
Carl Schurz Park was calm. Unlike vast sections of the city, it could be visited after dark without fear. The stillness, the calmness: marauders seldom lurked there.
He took a bench and sat staring off across the cave of water. The pain was persistent and he massaged the inner comers of his eyes with a gentle fingertip.
There had been a woman he had met at a cocktail party. From Maine. He hesitated to think of her in such simplified ways, but there was no denying her sweetness and virginity. Congregationalist, raised too well for life in this city, she had come here from Maine to work in publishing, and the men had not been good to her. Attracted by her well-scrubbed face and her light, gentle manner, they had stepped out with her two, three, once even four times. But she had been raised too well for life taken in late-night sessions, and they
had drifted back to their meat racks and their loneliness mutually shared. One had even suggested she seduce a platonic friend of hers, a gentle young man coming to grips with his sexuality, and then she would be fit for a proper affair. She had asked him to leave. The following week he was seeing the wife of a production assistant at the publishing house in which they all labored, and the girl from Maine had signed up for tap dancing lessons.
She had met Brubaker at the cocktail party and they had talked, leaning out the thirty-first floor window to escape the smoke and the chatter.
It became clear to him that she had decided he was the one. Reality and upbringing waged their war in her, and she had decided to capitulate. He walked her home and she said, “Come in for a graham cracker. I have lots of them.” He said, “What time is it?” His watch said 12:07. ‘‘I’ll come up till twelve-fifteen.” She smiled shyly and said, “I’m being aggressive. It’s not easy for me.” He said, “I don’t want to come up for very long. We might get into trouble.” He meant it. He liked her. But she was hurting. “It’s not a kind of trouble you haven’t been in before,” she said. He smiled gently and said, “No, but it’s a kind of trouble you’ve never been in.”
But he could not refuse her. And he was good with her, as good as he could be, accepting the responsibility, hoping when she found the man she had been saving herself for, he would be very very loving. At least, he knew, he had put her out of reach of the kind of men who sought virgins. Neither the sort who would marry only a virgin, nor the predators who went on safari for such endangered species were human enough for her.
And when he left, the next morning, he had a headache. The same pinpoint of anguish that now pulsed between and above his eyes as he sat in the park. He had felt changed after leaving her, just as he did tonight. Was there a diminishing taking place?