"Sure, Vi," Howard said, and rose slowly to his feet with Vi's dark-blue coat in his arms. His eyes never left her as she went down the hall and through the bathroom door.
"Con Ed loves it when you leave the lights on, Howie," she called back over her shoulder.
"I did it on purpose," he said. "I knew that'd be your first stop."
She laughed. He heard the rustle of her clothes. "You know me too well--people will say we're in love."
You ought to tell her--warn her, Howard thought, and knew he could do nothing of the kind. What was he supposed to say? Watch out, Vi, there's a finger coming out of the basin drain-hole, don't let the guy it belongs to poke you in the eye if you bend over to get a glass of water?
Besides, it had just been a hallucination, one brought on by a little air in the pipes and his fear of rats and mice. Now that some minutes had gone by, this seemed almost plausible to him.
Just the same, he only stood there with Vi's coat in his arms, waiting to see if she would scream. And, after ten or fifteen endless seconds, she did.
"My God, Howard!"
Howard jumped, hugging the coat more tightly to his chest. His heart, which had begun to slow down, began to do its Morse-code number again. He struggled to speak, but at first his throat was locked shut.
"What?" he managed finally. "What, Vi? What is it?"
"The towels! Half of em are on the floor! Sheesh! What happened?"
"I don't know," he called back. His heart was thumping harder than ever, and it was impossible to tell if the sickish, pukey feeling deep down in his belly was relief or terror. He supposed he must have knocked the towels off the shelf during his first attempt to exit the bathroom, when he had hit the wall.
"It must be spookies," she said. "Also, I don't mean to nag, but you forgot to put the ring down again."
"Oh--sorry," he said.
"Yeah, that's what you always say," her voice floated back. "Sometimes I think you want me to fall in and drown. I really do!" There was a clunk as she put it down herself. Howard waited, heart thumping away, her coat still hugged against his chest.
"He holds the record for the most strikeouts in a single game," Alex Trebek read.
"Who was Tom Seaver?" Mildred snapped right back.
"Roger Clemens, you nitwit," Howard said.
Pwooosh! There went the flush. And the moment he was waiting for (Howard had just realized this consciously) was now at hand. The pause seemed almost endless. Then he heard the squeak of the washer in the bathroom faucet marked H (he kept meaning to replace that washer and kept forgetting), followed by water flowing into the basin, followed by the sound of Vi briskly washing her hands.
No screams.
Of course not, because there was no finger.
"Air in the pipes," Howard said with more assurance, and went to hang up his wife's coat.
*
She came out, adjusting her skirt. "I got the ice cream," she said, "cherry-vanilla, just like you wanted. But before we try it, why don't you have a beer with me, Howie? It's this new stuff. American Grain, it's called. I never heard of it, but it was on sale so I bought a six-pack. Nothing ventured, nothing grained, am I right?"
"Hardy-har," he said, wrinkling his nose. Vi's penchant for puns had struck him as cute when he first met her, but it had staled somewhat over the years. Still, now that he was over his fright, a beer sounded like just the thing. Then, as Vi went out into the kitchen to get him a glass of her new find, he realized he wasn't over his fright at all. He supposed that having a hallucination was better than seeing a real finger poking out of the drain of the bathroom basin, a finger that was alive and moving around, but it wasn't exactly an evening-maker, either.
Howard sat down in his chair again. As Alex Trebek announced the Final Jeopardy category--it was The Sixties--he found himself thinking of various TV shows he'd seen where it turned out that a character who was having hallucinations either had (a) epilepsy or (b) a brain tumor. He found he could remember a lot of them.
"You know," Vi said, coming back into the room with two glasses of beer, "I don't like the Vietnamese people who run that market. I don't think I'll ever like them. I think they're sneaky."
"Have you ever caught them doing anything sneaky?" Howard asked. He himself thought the Lahs were exceptional people. . . but tonight he didn't care much one way or the other.
"No," Vi said, "not a thing. And that makes me all the more suspicious. Also, they smile all the time. My father used to say, 'Never trust a smiling man.' He also said . . . Howard, are you feeling all right?"
"He said that?" Howard asked, making a rather feeble attempt at levity.
"Tres amusant, cheri. You look as pale as milk. Are you coming down with something?"
No, he thought of saying, I'm not coming down with something--that's too mild a term for it. I think I might have epilepsy or maybe a brain tumor, Vi--how's that for coming down with something?
"It's just work, I guess," he said. "I told you about the new tax account. St. Anne's Hospital."
"What about it?"
"It's a rat's nest," he said, and that immediately made him think of the bathroom again--the sink and the drain. "Nuns shouldn't be allowed to do bookkeeping. Someone ought to have put it in the Bible just to make sure."
"You let Mr. Lathrop push you around too much," Vi told him firmly. "It's going to go on and on unless you stand up for yourself. Do you want a heart attack?"
"No." And I don't want epilepsy or a brain tumor, either. Please, God, make it a one-time thing. Okay? Just some weird mental burp that happens once and never again. Okay? Please? Pretty please? With some sugar on it?
"You bet you don't," she said grimly. "Arlene Katz was saying just the other day that when men under fifty have heart attacks, they almost never come out of the hospital again. And you're only forty-one. You have to stand up for yourself, Howard. Stop being such a pushover."
"I guess so," he said glumly.
Alex Trebek came back on and gave the Final Jeopardy answer: "This group of hippies crossed the United States in a bus with writer Ken Kesey." The Final Jeopardy music began to play. The two men contestants were writing busily. Mildred, the woman with the microwave oven in her ear, looked lost. At last she began to scratch something. She did it with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
Vi took a deep swallow from her glass. "Hey!" she said. "Not bad! And only two-sixty-seven a six-pack!"
Howard drank some himself. It was nothing special, but it was wet, at least, and cool. Soothing.
Neither of the male contestants was even close. Mildred was also wrong, but she, at least, was in the ball-park. "Who were the Merry Men?" she had written.
"Merry Pranksters, you dope," Howard said.
Vi looked at him admiringly. "You know all the answers, Howard, don't you?"
"I only wish I did," Howard said, and sighed.
*
Howard didn't care much for beer, but that night he helped himself to three cans of Vi's new find nevertheless. Vi commented on it, said that if she had known he was going to like it that much, she would have stopped by the drugstore and gotten him an IV hookup. Another time-honored Vi-ism. He forced a smile. He was actually hoping the beer would send him off to sleep quickly. He was afraid that, without a little help, he might be awake for quite awhile, thinking about what he had imagined he'd seen in the bathroom sink. But, as Vi had often informed him, beer was full of vitamin P, and around eight-thirty, after she had retired to the bedroom to put on her nightgown, Howard went reluctantly into the bathroom to relieve himself.
First he walked over to the bathroom sink and forced himself to look in.
Nothing.
This was a relief (in the end, a hallucination was still better than an actual finger, he had discovered, despite the possibility of a brain tumor), but he still didn't like looking down the drain. The brass cross-hatch inside that was supposed to catch things like clots of hair or dropped bobby-pins had disappeared years ago, and so there was
only a dark hole rimmed by a circle of tarnished steel. It looked like a staring eyesocket.
Howard took the rubber plug and stuck it into the drain.
That was better.
He stepped away from the sink, put up the toilet ring (Vi complained bitterly if he forgot to put it down when he was through, but never seemed to feel any pressing need to put it back up when she was), and addressed the john. He was one of those men who only began to urinate immediately when the need was extreme (and who could not urinate at all in crowded public lavatories--the thought of all those men standing in line behind him just shut down his circuits), and he did now what he almost always did in the few seconds between the aiming of the instrument and the commencement of target practice: he recited prime numbers in his mind.
He had reached thirteen and was on the verge of flowing when there was a sudden sharp sound from behind him: pwuck! His bladder, recognizing the sound of the rubber plug being forced sharply out of the drain even before his brain did, clamped shut immediately (and rather painfully).
A moment later that sound--the sound of the nail clipping lightly against the porcelain as the questing finger twisted and turned--began again. Howard's skin went cold and seemed to shrink until it was too small to cover the flesh beneath. A single drop of urine spilled from him and plinked in the bowl before his penis actually seemed to shrink in his hand, retreating like a turtle seeking the safety of its shell.
Howard walked slowly and not quite steadily over to the washbasin. He looked in.
The finger was back. It was a very long finger, but seemed otherwise normal. Howard could see the nail, which was neither bitten nor abnormally long, and the first two knuckles. As he watched, it continued to tap and feel its way around the basin.
Howard bent down and looked under the sink. The pipe which came out of the floor was no more than three inches in diameter. It was not big enough for an arm. Besides, it made a severe bend at the place where the sink trap was. So just what was that finger attached to? What could it be attached to?
Howard straightened up again, and for one alarming moment he felt that his head might simply detach itself from his neck and float away. Small black specks flocked across his field of vision.
I'm going to faint! he thought. He grabbed his right earlobe and yanked it once, hard, the way a frightened passenger who has seen trouble up the line might yank the Emergency Stop cord of a railroad car. The dizziness passed . . . but the finger was still there.
It was not a hallucination. How could it be? He could see a tiny bead of water on the nail, and a tiny thread of whiteness beneath it--soap, almost surely soap. Vi had washed her hands after using the john.
It could be a hallucination, though. It still could be. Just because you see soap and water on it, does that mean you can't be imagining it? And listen, Howard--if you're not imagining it, what's it doing in there? How did it get there in the first place? And how come Vi didn't see it?
Call her, then--call her in! his mind instructed, and in the next microsecond countermanded its own order. No! Don't do that! Because if you go on seeing it and she doesn't--
Howard shut his eyes tight and for a moment lived in a world where there were only red flashes of light and his own crazy heartbeat.
When he opened them again, the finger was still there.
"What are you?" he whispered through tightly stretched lips. "What are you, and what are you doing here?"
The finger stopped its blind explorations at once. It swivelled--and then pointed directly at Howard. Howard blundered a step backward, his hands rising to his mouth to stifle a scream. He wanted to tear his eyes away from the wretched, awful thing, wanted to flee the bathroom in a rush (and never mind what Vi might think or say or see) . . . but for the moment he was paralyzed and unable to tear his gaze away from the pink-white digit, which now resembled nothing so much as an organic periscope.
Then it curled at the second knuckle. The end of the finger dipped, touched the porcelain, and resumed its tapping circular explorations once more.
"Howie?" Vi called. "Did you fall in?"
"Be right out!" he called back in an insanely cheery voice.
He flushed away the single drop of pee which had fallen into the toilet, then moved toward the door, giving the sink a wide berth. He did catch sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, however; his eyes were huge, his skin wretchedly pale. He gave each of his cheeks a brisk pinch before leaving the bathroom, which had become, in the space of one short hour, the most horrible and inexplicable place he had ever visited in his life.
*
When Vi came out into the kitchen to see what was taking him so long, she found Howard looking into the refrigerator.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"A Pepsi. I think I'll go down to Lah's and get one."
"On top of three beers and a bowl of cherry-vanilla ice cream? You'll bust, Howard!"
"No, I won't," he said. But if he wasn't able to offload what his kidneys were holding, he might.
"Are you sure you feel all right?" Vi was looking at him critically, but her tone was gentler now--tinged with real concern. "Because you look terrible. Really."
"Well," he said reluctantly, "there's been some flu going around the office. I suppose--"
"I'll go get you the damned soda, if you really need it," she said.
"No you won't," Howard interposed hastily. "You're in your nightgown. Look--I'll put on my coat."
"When was the last time you had a soup-to-nuts physical, Howard? It's been so long I've forgotten."
"I'll look it up tomorrow," he said vaguely, going into the little foyer where their coats were hung. "It must be in one of the insurance folders."
"Well you better! And if you insist on being crazy and going out, wear my scarf!"
"Okay. Good idea." He pulled on his topcoat and buttoned it facing away from her, so she wouldn't see how his hands were shaking. When he turned around, Vi was just disappearing back into the bathroom. He stood there in fascinated silence for several moments, waiting to hear if she would scream this time, and then the water began to run in the basin. This was followed by the sound of Vi brushing her teeth in her usual manner: con brio.
He stood there a moment longer, and his mind suddenly offered its verdict in four flat, non-nonsense words: I'm losing my grip.
It might be . . . but that didn't change the fact that if he didn't take a whiz very soon, he was going to have an embarrassing accident. That, at least, was a problem he could solve, and Howard took a certain comfort in the fact. He opened the door, began to step out, then paused to pull Vi's scarf off the hook.
When are you going to tell her about this latest fascinating development in the life of Howard Mitla? his mind inquired suddenly.
Howard shut the thought out and concentrated on tucking the ends of the scarf into the lapels of his overcoat.
*
The Mitla apartment was on the fourth floor of a nine-story building on Hawking Street. To the right and half a block down, on the corner of Hawking and Queens Boulevard, was Lah's Twenty-Four-Hour Delicatessen and Convenience Market. Howard turned left and walked to the end of the building. Here was a narrow alleyway which gave on the airshaft at the rear of the building. Trash-bins lined both sides of the alley. Between them were littery spaces where homeless people--some but by no means all of them winos--often made their comfortless newspaper beds. No one seemed to have taken up residence in the alley this evening, for which Howard was profoundly grateful.
He stepped between the first and second bins, unzipped, and urinated copiously. At first the relief was so great that he felt almost blessed in spite of the evening's trials, but as the flow slackened and he began to consider his position again, anxiety started creeping back in.
His position was, in a word, untenable.
Here he was, pissing against the wall of the building in which he had a warm, safe apartment, looking over his shoulder all the while to see if he was being observed. The a
rrival of a junkie or a mugger while he was in such a defenseless position would be bad, but he wasn't sure that the arrival of someone he knew--the Fensters from 2C, for instance, or the Dattlebaums from 3F--wouldn't be even worse. What could he say? And what might that motormouth Alicia Fenster say to Vi?
He finished, zipped his pants, and walked back to the mouth of the alley. After a prudent look in both directions, he proceeded down to Lah's and bought a can of Pepsi-Cola from the smiling, olive-skinned Mrs. Lah.
"You look pale tonight, Mr. Mit-ra," she said through her constant smile. "Feering all right?"
Oh yes, he thought. I'm fearing just fine, thank you, Mrs. Lah. Never better on that score.
"I think I might have caught a little bug at the sink," he told her. She began to frown through her smile and he realized what he had said. "At the office, I mean."
"Better bunder up walm," she said. The frown line had smoothed out of her almost ethereal forehead. "Radio say cold weather is coming."
"Thank you," he said, and left. On his way back to the apartment, he opened the Pepsi and poured it out on the sidewalk. Considering the fact that his bathroom had apparently become hostile territory, the last thing he needed tonight was any more to drink.
When he let himself in again, he could hear Vi snoring softly in the bedroom. The three beers had sent her off quickly and efficiently. He put the empty soda can on the counter in the kitchen, then paused outside the bathroom door. After a moment or two, he tilted his head against the wood.
Scratch-scratch. Scritch-scritch-scratch.
"Dirty son of a bitch," he whispered.
He went to bed without brushing his teeth for the first time since his two-week stint at Camp High Pines, when he had been twelve and his mother had forgotten to pack his toothbrush.
*
And lay in bed beside Vi, wakeful.
He could hear the sound of the finger making its ceaseless exploratory rounds in the bathroom sink, the nail clicking and tap-dancing. He couldn't really hear it, not with both doors closed, and he knew this, but he imagined he heard it, and that was just as bad.
No, it isn't, he told himself. At least you know you're imagining it. With the finger itself you're not sure.
This was but little comfort. He still wasn't able to get to sleep, and he was no closer to solving his problem. He did know he couldn't spend the rest of his life making excuses to go outside and pee in the alley next to the building. He doubted if he could manage that for even forty-eight hours. And what was going to happen the next time he had to take a dump, friends and neighbors? There was a question he'd never seen asked in a round of Final Jeopardy, and he didn't have a clue what the answer might be. Not the alley, though--he was sure of that much, at least.