Others would be content to call it a dream. But what is a dream? Who experienced what? And where and when?
I was drugged by the vanished splendors of the phantasmal voyage. I could neither return nor depart. I lay abed with eyes lightly closed and reviewed the procession of hypnagogic images which passed like ghostly sentinels from station to station along the tenuous frontiers of sleep. Recollections of other waking images crowded in, leaving dark stains across the bright track made by the passage of the autochthonous ghosts. There was the Una to whom I had waved goodbye one Summer’s day, the Una on whom I had turned my back, the Una whose eyes had followed me down the street, and at the corner when I turned I had felt those eyes piercing through me—and I knew that no matter where I went or how much I would try to forget, those two beseeching eyes would be forever buried between my shoulder blades. There was another Una who showed me her bedroom—years later when we met by chance on the street in front of her house. A changed Una, who blossomed only in dream. The Una who belonged to another man, the Una surrounded by the spawn of wedlock. A recurrent dream this, pleasant, trivial, comforting. It recurred obsessively in a configuration almost mathematically exact. Guided by my double, George Marshall, I would stand in front of her house and, like a Peeping Tom, I would wait for her to come out of the house with sleeves rolled up and take a breath of air. She was never aware of our presence, though we were there as large as life and only a few feet away from her. That meant that I was privileged to observe her at leisure, even to discuss her points with my companion and guide. She always looked the same—the matron in full bloom. I would have my fill of her and then quietly take my leave. It would be dark and I would make a desperate effort to remember the name of the street which somehow I never could find unaided. But at the corner, looking for the street sign, the darkness would become a thick pall of black. I knew that then George Marshall would take my arm and say, as he always did, “Don’t worry, I know where it is I’ll bring you back again someday.” And then George Marshall, my very double, my friend and traitor, would suddenly give me the slip, and I would be left to stumble about in the grimy purlieus of some odious quarter which reeked of crime and vice.
From bar to bar I would wander, always looked on askance, always insulted and humiliated, often pummeled and kicked about like a sack of oats. Time after time I would find myself flat on the pavement, the blood trickling from mouth and ears, my hands cut to ribbons, my body one great welter of bruises and contusions. It was a terrible price I always had to pay for the privilege of watching her take a breath of air. But it was worth it! And when in my dreams I saw George Marshall approaching, when I heard the promise which his reassuring words of greeting always contained, my heart would begin to pound furiously and I would hasten my steps to arrive in front of her house at just the right moment. Strange that I could never find my way alone. Strange that George Marshall had to be the one to lead me to her, for George Marshall had never seen in her anything more than a pleasing bundle of flesh. But George Marshall, tied to me by an invisible cord, had been the silent witness of a drama which his unbelieving eyes had repudiated. And so in dream George Marshall could look again with eyes of wonder; he too could find a certain contentment in rediscovering the junction where our ways had parted.
Suddenly now I remembered something I had completely forgotten. I opened wide my eyes as if to stare across the stretch of distant past and capture the angle of an empty vision. I see the back yard, as it was during the long winter, the black boughs of the elm trees laced in ice, the ground hard and barren, the sky splotched with zinc and laudanum. I am the prisoner in the house of misplaced love. I am August Angst growing a melancholy beard. I am a drone whose sole function is to shoot spermatozoa into the cuspidor of anguish. I pull off orgasms with zygomatic fury. I bite the beard which covers her mouth like moss. I chew fat pieces out of my own melancholy and spit them out like roaches.
All through the winter it goes on like this—until the day when I come home and find her lying on the bed in a pool of blood. In the dresser the doctor has left the body of the seven-month toothache wrapped in a towel. It is like a homunculus, the skin a dark red, and it has hair and nails. It lies breathless in the drawer of the dresser, a life yanked out of darkness and thrust back into darkness. It has no name, nor has it been loved, nor will it be mourned. It was pulled up by the roots, and if it shrieked no one heard. What life it had was lived and lost in sleep. Its death was only a further, deeper plunge into that sleep from which it never awakened.
I am standing at the window, gazing vacantly across the bleak yard at the window opposite. A form flits vaguely to and fro. Following it with a vacant stare a faint remembrance stirs, flickers, then gutters out. I am left to wallow in the morass of swamp-filled vagaries. I stand sullen and upright, like Rigor Mortis himself. I am the King of Silicon and my realm includes all that is tarnished and corroded.
Carlotta lies crosswise on the bed, her feet dangling over the edge. She will lie that way until the doctor comes and rouses her back to life. The landlady will come and change the sheets. The body will be disposed of in the usual way. We will be told to move, the room will be fumigated, the crime will be unrecorded. We will find another place with a bed, a stove, a chest of drawers. We will go through the same routine of eating, sleeping, breeding, and burying. August Angst will give way to Tracy le Crève-cœur. He will be an Arabian Knight with a penis of cool jade. He will eat nothing but spices and condiments and he will spill his seed recklessly. He will dismount, fold his penis like a jacknife, and take his place with the other emptied studs.
That form flitting to and fro—it was Una Gifford. Weeks later, after Carlotta and I had moved to another flat, we met on the street in front of her house. I went upstairs with her and perhaps I stayed a half hour, perhaps longer, but all I can remember of that visit is that she brought me to the bedroom and showed me the bed, their bed in which a child had already been born.
Not long thereafter I managed to escape from Carlotta’s devouring clutches. Towards the end I had been carrying on with Maude. When we were married about three months a most unexpected meeting occurred. I had gone to the cinema alone one night. That is, I had bought my ticket and entered the theater. I had to wait a few moments in the rear of the house until a seat could be found. In the subdued light an usherette approached me carrying a flashlight. It was Carlotta. “Harry!” she said, giving a little cry like a wounded doe. She was too overpowered to say much. She kept looking at me, listening with eyes grown large and moist. I quickly withered under this steady, silent accusation. “I’ll find you a seat,” she said at last, and as she ushered me to a place she murmured in my ear: “I’ll try to join you later.”
I kept my eyes riveted on the screen but my thoughts were traveling like wildfire. It might have been hours that I sat thus, my brain reeling with recollections. Suddenly I was aware of her sliding into the seat beside me, grasping my arm. Quickly she slid her hand over mine and as she squeezed it I looked at her and saw the tears rolling down her cheeks. “God, Harry, it’s been so long,” she whispered, and with that her hand traveled to my leg and grasped it fervently just above the knee. Instantly I did the same, and we sat thus for some time, our lips sealed, our eyes staring blankly at the flickering screen.
Presently a wave of passion swept over us and our hands groped frantically for the burning flesh. We had hardly finished the quest when the picture came to an end and the lights were turned on.
“I’ll take you home,” I said, as we stumbled out into the aisle. My voice was thick and hoarse, my throat dry, my lips parched. She put her arm in mine, rolled her thigh against mine. We staggered towards the exit. In the lobby she stopped a moment to powder her face. She had not changed greatly; the eyes had grown larger, more sorrowful. They were brilliant and haunting. A mauve dress of some clinging, filmlike material showed her figure to advantage. I looked at her feet and suddenly recalled that they had been tiny and supple, the nimble feet of one who
would never grow old.
In the cab I started to tell her what happened since I ran away, but she put her hand over my mouth and in a low husky voice she begged me not to tell her until we got home. Then, still holding her hand over my mouth, she said: “You’re married, aren’t you?” I nodded. “I knew it,” she murmured, and then she withdrew her hand.
The next moment she flung her arms about me. Kissing me wildly, she sobbed the words out—“Harry, Harry, you should never have treated me that way. You could have told me everything . . . everything. You were terribly cruel, Harry. You killed everything.”
I held her close, pulling her leg up over mine and swiftly running my hand up her leg until it settled in her crotch. The cab stopped suddenly and we disentangled ourselves. I followed her up the stoop tremblingly, knowing not what to expect once we were inside. As the house door closed behind us she whispered in my ear that I was to move silently. “You mustn’t let Georgie hear you. He’s very ill . . . he’s dying, I’m afraid.”
The hall was in pitch darkness. I had to hold her hand as she led me up the two long winding flights or stairs to the attic where she and her son were finishing their days.
She turned on a dim light and with forefinger to her lips she indicated the couch. Then she stood with her ear to the door of the adjoining room and listened intently to make certain that Georgie was asleep. Finally she tiptoed to my side and sat herself gingerly on the edge of the couch. “Be careful,” she whispered, “it squeaks.”
I was so bewildered that I neither whispered nor moved a muscle. What Georgie would do if he were to find me sitting there I didn’t dare to think. And here he was dying, at last. A horrible end. And here we were, sitting like guilty mummies in a poverty-stricken garret. And yet, I reflected, it was perhaps fortunate that this little scene could only be played in a muffled key. God knows what terrible words of reproach she might have hurled at me had she been able to speak out.
“Put out the light!” I begged in mute pantomime. As she rose to obey I pointed to the floor, signifying that I would stretch myself out beside the couch. It was some moments before she joined me on the floor. She was standing in a corner stealthily removing her things. I watched her by the faint light which stole through the windows. As she reached for a wrap to throw about her naked figure I quickly unbuttoned my fly.
It was difficult to move without making a sound. She seemed terrified of the thought that Georgie might hear us. I understood that he had conveniently saddled me with the responsibility for his suffering. I understood that she had silently acquiesced and that her terror now was a recoil from the ultimate horror of betrayal.
To move without breathing, to entwine ourselves like two corkscrews, to fuck with a passion such as we had never experienced before and yet not make a sound, required a skill and patience which would have been admirable to dwell on were it not for the fact that something else was going on which affected me profoundly. . . . She was weeping without tears. I could hear it gurgling inside her, like a toilet box which won’t stop running. And though she had begged me in a frightened whisper not to come, that she couldn’t wash because of the noise, because of Georgie in the next room, though I knew that she was the sort who gets caught just by looking at her, and that if she were caught it would go hard with her, still, and perhaps more because of the silent weeping, more because I wanted to put an end to the gurgling, I came again and again. She too passed from one orgasm to another, knowing each time that I would shoot a wad into her womb, but unable to help herself. Never once did I take my cock out. I would wait quietly for the answering needle bath, jam it in tight like a cartridge, and then go off into the electrically moist darkness of a mouth with the soft lips of an artichoke. There was something fiendishly detached about it, almost as if I were a pyromaniac sitting in a comfortable chair in my own house, which I had set fire to with my own hand, knowing that I would not budge until the very chair I sat in began to sizzle and roast my ass.
When eventually I went to the landing outside and stood embracing her for the last time, she whispered that she needed money for the rent, begged me to bring it to her on the morrow. And then, as I was about to descend the stairs, she pulled me back, her lips glued to my ear. “He won’t last another week!” These words came to me as if through an amplifier. Even today, as I repeat them to myself, I can hear the soft whistling rush of air that accompanied the sound of her almost inaudible voice. It was as if my ear were a dandelion and each little thistle an antenna which caught the message and relayed it to the roof of my brain where it exploded with the dull splash of a howitzer. “He won’t last another week!” I said it all the way home, a thousand times or more. And every time I commenced this refrain I saw a photogenic image of fright—the head of a woman sawed off by the frame of the picture just below the scalp. I saw it always the same—a face looming out of darkness, the upper part of the head caught as in a trap door. A face with a calcium glow about it, suspended by its own dreamlike effort above an indistinguishable mass of writhing creatures such as infest the swampy regions of the mind’s dark fears. And then I saw Georgie being born—just as she had related it to me once. Born on the floor of the outhouse where she had locked herself in to escape the hands of his father, who was blind with drink. I saw her lying huddled on the floor and Georgie between her legs. Lying that way until the moon flooded them with mysterious platinum waves. How she loved Georgie! How she clung to him! Nothing was too good for her Georgie. Then north on the night train with her little black sheep. Starving herself to feed Georgie, selling herself in order to put Georgie through school. Everything for Georgie. “You were crying,” I would say, catching her unawares. “What is it—has he been treating you badly again?” There wasn’t any good in Georgie: he was full of black pus. “Hum that tune,” he would say sometimes, the three of us sitting in the dark. And they would begin to hum and croon, and after a time Georgie would come over to her, put his arms around her, and weep like a child. “I’m no goddamned good,” he would say, over and over. And then he would cough and the coughing never stopped. Like hers, his eyes were large and black; they peered out from his hollowed face like two burning holes. Then he went away—to a ranch—and I thought maybe he would get well again. A lung was punctured, and when that healed, the other one was punctured. And before the doctors had finished their experiments I was like a bundle of malignant tumors, rearing to explode, to break the chains, to kill his mother if necessary, anything, anything, only no more heartaches, no more misery, no more silent suffering. When had I ever truly loved her? When? I couldn’t think. I had been searching for a cozy womb and I had been caught in the outhouse, had locked myself in, had watched the moon come and go, had seen one bloody pulp after another fall from between her legs. Phoebus! Yes, that was the place! Near the Old Soldiers’ Home. And he, the father and seducer, was safely behind the bars in Fortress Monroe. He was. And then, when no one any longer mentioned his name, he was a corpse lying in a coffin a few blocks away and before I ever realized that they had shipped his body North, she had buried him—with military honors! Christ! What all can happen behind one’s back—while you’re out for a walk or going to the library to look up an important book! One lung, two lungs, an abortion, a stillbirth, milk legs, no work, boarders, hauling ash cans, hocking bicycles, sitting on the roof watching pigeons: these phantasmal objects and events fill the screen, then pass like smoke, are forgotten, buried, thrown in the ash can like rotted tumors, until . . . two lips pressed against the waxen ear explode with a deafening dandelion roar, whereupon August Angst, Tracy le Crève-cœur and Rigor Mortis sail slantwise through the roof of the brain to hang suspended in a sky shimmering with ultraviolet.
The day after this episode I do not go back to her with the money, nor do I appear ten days later at the funeral. But about three weeks later I feel compelled to unburden myself to Maude. Of course I say nothing about the whispering fuck on the floor that night, but I do confess to escorting her to her rooms. To another woman I m
ight have confessed everything, but not to Maude. As it is, with only a thimbleful spilled out, she’s already as stiff as a frightened mare. She’s not listening any more—just waiting for me to conclude so that she can say with absolute finality—NO!
To be fair to her, it was a bit mad to expect her to consent to my suggestion. It would be a rare woman who would say yes. What did I want her to do? Why, to invite Carlotta to live with us. Yes, finally I had come to the extraordinary conclusion that the only decent thing to do would be to ask Carlotta to share her life with us. I was trying to make it plain to Maude that I had never loved Carlotta, that I had only pitied her, and that therefore I owed her something. Queer masculine logic! Dingo! Absolutely dingo. But I believed every word I uttered. Carlotta would come and take a room and live her own life. We would treat her graciously, like a fallen queen. It must have sounded terribly hollow and false to Maude. But as I listened to the reverberations of my own voice I had the distinct sensation of hearing those sound waves quell the horrible gurgle of the toilet box. Since Maude had already made up her mind, since no one was listening except myself, since the words bounced back like eggplants ricocheting against a gourd, I continued with my transmission, growing more and more earnest, more and more convinced, more and more determined to have my way. One wave on top of another, one rhythm against another: quell against beat, surge against gush, confession against compulsion, ocean against brook. Beat it down, sink it, drown it, drive it below the earth, set a mountain on top of it! I went on and on, con amore, con furioso, con connectibusque, con abulia, con aesthesia, con Silesia . . . And all the while she listened like a rock, fireproofing her little camisoled heart, her tin crackerbox, her meat-loafed gizzard, her fumigated womb.
The answer was No! Yesterday, today, tomorrow—NO! Positively no! Her whole physical, mental, moral and spiritual development had brought her to that great moment when she could answer triumphantly: NO! Positively No!