The Water-Method Man

  Her voice had some ice in it, but Trumper didn't seem to care. 'You realized it had been a mistake,' he prodded.

  'No,' she said. 'I just wasn't interested in doing it any more. It wasn't any mistake. I didn't know anybody else, then ...'

  'And then you met me?'

  'I stopped sleeping with Ralph before I met you.'

  'Why did you stop?' he asked.

  She rolled over in bed, so that her back was to him. 'My twat fell out,' she said to the wall of aquariums.

  Trumper didn't say anything; he began his trance then.

  'Look,' Tulpen said a few minutes later. 'What is it? I just didn't feel much for Ralph that way. But I liked him, and I still like him, Trumper. Just not in that way ...'

  'Do you ever think about sleeping with him again?'

  'No.'

  'Well, he thinks about sleeping with you again.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Interested?' he asked. She swore to herself and turned away from him. He felt himself turning to stone.

  'Trumper?' she asked him later; he'd been still a long while. 'Why don't you like Ralph, Trumper? Is it the film?'

  But it wasn't that, really. After all, he could have simply refused; he could have said that it touched him too deeply. But it didn't and he had to admit that he had an interest in it. It was not a therapeutic interest, either; he knew he was basically a ham, and he liked seeing himself in a movie.

  'It's not that I don't like Ralph, exactly,' he answered. She rolled over, touched his wooden thigh, and said something he didn't hear. Then ... he thought of killing first the fish, and when the phone rang again, he would have killed the person who touched it.

  He had a cramp in his back from sitting up straight for so long and Tulpen left him alone for a while before she tried again. 'Trumper? You know, you don't make love to me enough. Not nearly enough.'

  He thought about that. Then he thought about his pending operation, about Dr Vigneron and the water method. 'It's my prick,' he said at last. 'I'm going to get it fixed up, so I'll be as good as new.'

  But he liked making love to Tulpen very much, and he was worried by what she said. He thought about making love to her right now, but he had to get up to pee.

  In the bathroom he studied himself in the mirror and watched the fear come into his expression when he had to pinch himself open before he could go. It was getting worse. Vigneron had been right again; you sometimes did have to wait a few weeks for minor surgery.

  It seemed essential to him that he make love to Tulpen right away, but then - perhaps because he recognized something in his expression in the mirror - he thought of Merrill Overturf and pissed so hard that tears came to his eyes.

  He was in the bathroom a long time, until Tulpen, groggy, called to him from the bed. 'What are you doing in there?' she called.

  'Oh, nothing, Big,' he said, then tried to swallow it back.

  When he came back to bed, she was sitting up, the covers tight around her, crying. She'd heard him saying it, all right.

  'Tulpen,' he said, putting his arm around her.

  'No, "Biggie,"' she whispered.

  'Tulpen,' he said, and tried to kiss her.

  She shoved him away; she was out to get him now. 'I'll tell you one thing,' she said. 'Old Ralph Packer never called me anyone else's name.'

  Trumper moved away and sat at the foot of the bed.

  'And you want to know what?' she yelled. 'I think it's bullshit that you don't make love to me enough because of your old prick!'

  Then the beige blowfish came up to the glass again, stared at Trumper and went through its gross routine once more.

  What Tulpen said was true and he knew it. What pained him worse was that this conversation wasn't new. He'd had it all before - a number of times - with Biggie. So he sat at the foot of the bed, wished for catatonia and achieved it. When the phone rang a third time, he didn't care whether it was Ralph or not. If he could have moved, he would have answered it.

  Tulpen probably felt as lonely, because she answered it. 'Sure,' Bogus heard her say tiredly. 'Sure, come on over and make your fucking movie.'

  But Trumper still sat there like a stone worrying about the next transition. To be in Ralph's movie required that he get out of the movie he was in now, didn't it?

  Then Tulpen put her head in his lap, her face turned up to him. It was a gesture - she had many of them - as if to say, OK, a bridge in our complex landscape is now at least defined, though not yet crossed. Maybe it can be.

  They stayed in that position for a long time, as if that were as good a way as any to get ready for Ralph.

  'Trumper?' Tulpen whispered finally. 'When you do make love to me, I really like it.'

  'So do I,' he said.

  26

  'Gra! Gra!'

  JUST HOW LONG his mind was lost he didn't know, or how fully he'd recovered it by the time he was aware of some more writing in the typewriter before him. He read it, wondering who had written it, poring over it like a letter he'd received, or even like someone else's letter to someone else. Then he saw the dark, crouching figure in the bottom corner of his French windows and startled himself by suddenly sitting upright and moaning, while simultaneously in the mirroring window, a terrifying gnomelike replica of himself reared up and bleared like a microscopic specimen.

  It was when he recognized the moan as his own that he also heard the growing commotion downstairs in the Taschy lobby, or perhaps as close as the second floor. Not remembering where he was, he opened his door and screamed some hysterical gibberish at the faces peering from the open doorways up and down the hall. Matching him terror for terror, three faces screamed back to him, and Trumper tried to identify the other noise, which was rising like fire from the second floor.

  Which tape is this? When was I in an asylum?

  Cautiously he crept toward the stairwell; all along the hall no one ventured out a doorway - for fear, perhaps, that he'd scream at them again.

  Up the stairwell, Frau Taschy's voice reached him. 'Is he dead?' she asked, and Trumper heard himself whisper, 'No, I am not.' But they were talking about someone else.

  He moved down to the half-landing and saw a crush of people milling in the hall below. One of the whores was saying, 'I'm sure he's dead. No one ever passed out on me like that - never.'

  'You shouldn't have moved him,' someone said.

  'I had to get him off me, didn't I?' the whore said, and Frau Taschy looked scornfully down the hall at a man emerging from a room, zipping his fly, carrying his shoes under one arm. The whore emerging behind him said, 'What is it? What's wrong?'

  'Someone died on Jolanta,' someone said, and they all laughed.

  'You were too much for him,' said another of the ladies, and Jolanta, who was wearing only her girdle and stockings, said, 'Maybe he just had too much to drink.'

  Along the hall, dark and head-down men burst from rooms, carrying their clothes, as darting in their movements as startled birds.

  'He's too young to be dead,' Frau Taschy said, which seemed to make the scurrying men sidle past her even more fearfully. It was as if they'd never thought of it before: Fucking can be dangerous. It can kill even the young!

  Such a notion hardly came as a surprise to Trumper, who moved confidently down from the half-landing into the sex-smelling hall, as if his mind had now adjusted and accepted the creature in the window as his own reflection or as if he were asleep. In fact, he wasn't sure that he wasn't.

  The whore said, 'He went cold all over. I mean cold.'

  But in the doorway of the stricken screwer's room, Frau Taschy said, 'He moved! I swear he did!'

  The gathering in the hall was almost equally divided between those who moved away from the doorway and those who moved closer in order to see.

  'He moved again!' Frau Taschy reported.

  'Touch him!' said the whore who'd been involved. 'Just feel how cold he is.'

  'I'm not going to touch him, you can bet your life,' the Frau said. 'But you just
look and tell me he's not moving.'

  Trumper moved closer; over a warm, perfumed shoulder he saw through the doorway a shocking flash of nude white rump aquiver on the rumpled bed; then the doorway filled and cut off his vision.

  'Polizei!' someone yelled, and a man carrying all his clothes in a hasty wad bolted nude from a room down the hall, looked at the crowd and then hobbled back into his room. 'Polizei!' someone repeated as three policemen came down the hall abreast, in step - the two flanking the broader one, solidly in the middle, flicking open any closed door along the way. The one in the middle stared straight ahead and brayed, 'Don't anyone try to leave.'

  'Look, he's sitting up,' Frau Taschy remarked to the doorway.

  'Where's the trouble?' the middle policeman asked.

  Jolanta said, 'He blacked out. He went cold, right on top of me.' But when she approached the middle policeman, one of the flankers cut her off.

  'Move back,' he said. 'Everyone move back.'

  'What's happened here?' the middle policeman asked. The long gloves about his wrists were creased where his wrists cocked on his hips.

  'Jesus, if you'll just let me,' said the whore who'd been shoved off, 'I can tell you all about it.'

  The same policeman who'd cut her off said, 'Well, do it, then.'

  Then Frau Taschy cried, 'He's getting up! He's not dead! He never was!' But by the ensuing crash and groan, Bogus knew that the revival had been momentary.

  'Oh, dear,' the Frau muttered.

  Then the voice came up from the floor of the room, a voice just beginning to thaw out, slow and faint through all those chattering teeth. 'Ich bin nicht betrunken' ('I am not drunk') the voice said. 'Ich habe Zuckerkrankheit' ('I have diabetes').

  The middle policeman parted the mob at the doorway and swaggered roughly into the room, stepping on the outstretched hand of the pale creature curled on the threshold; the other hand weakly twitched at a tinny batch of tangled dog tags hung around the creature's neck.

  'Was Sie sehen ist ein Insulinreaktion' ('What you're seeing is an insulin reaction'), the creature droned. It was like a recorded voice, an answering service.

  'Futtern Sie mir Zucker, schnell!' ('Feed me sugar, quick!'), the voice cried.

  'Oh, sure,' the policeman said. 'Oh, sugar. You bet.' And he stooped to lift Merrill Overturf, as limp as an empty bathrobe, off the floor.

  'Sugar, he says,' the policeman quipped. 'He wants sugar!'

  'He's a diabetic,' Trumper told a whore near him, and he reached out to touch Merrill's crumpled hand. 'Hello, old Merrill,' Bogus said, before one of the flanking policemen, apparently misinterpreting the gesture toward the draped Overturf, dropped an elbow in Trumper's solar plexus and sent him spinning into a soft, musky lady who fiercely bit this surprise attacker in the neck. Out of breath, Bogus flayed out, trying to make words with his hands, but the two policemen pinned him against the banister and bent his head back, upside down in the stairwell. Upside down, Bogus saw Merrill carried down the stairs to the lobby. Competing with the creaking of the opening lobby door, Merrill's voice sang out, brittle and frail, 'Ich bin nicht betrunken!' Then the lobby door shut on his high, thin wail.

  Trumper fought for breath to explain. But he had only managed to grunt, 'He's not drunk. Let me go with him,' before one of the policemen squeezed his lips tight together kneading them like bread dough.

  Bogus shut his eyes and heard a whore say, 'He's a diabetic.' While one of the policemen grumbled in Trumper's ear, 'So you want to go with him, do you? What do you want to get your hands on him for?' When Trumper tried to shake his head and explain through his mushed mouth that he'd only reached out to touch Merrill because he was a friend, the whore said again, 'He's a diabetic. He told me. Let him go.'

  'A diabetic?' said one policeman. Bogus felt his pulse throb behind his eyes. 'A diabetic, eh?' the policeman repeated. Then they snapped Bogus upright and took their hands off his mouth. 'Are you a diabetic?' one of the policemen asked him; they stood warily, not touching him but ready to.

  'No,' Bogus said, feeling his stinging mouth, then said 'No' again, sure that they hadn't heard him because his mouth was full of burrs. 'No, I am not a diabetic,' he said more distinctly.

  So they grabbed him again. 'I didn't think he was one,' one policeman said to the other. As they bustled him through the lobby and outside into the first shock of cold, Bogus heard the faint, tired explanation of the whore behind them, calling, 'No, no ... Jesus. He's not the diabetic. Oh, Christ, I just meant he told me that the other one was ...' Then the lobby door shut her off and left Bogus in motion on the sidewalk, flanked by the two policemen hustling him away.

  'Where are we going?' Bogus asked them. 'My passport's in my room. For Christ's sake, I don't have to be treated like this! I wasn't attacking that fellow - he's my fucking friend! And he's got diabetes. Take me to where he is ...' But they just stuffed him into a green Polizei Volkswagen, cracking his shins on the seat-belt fixture and bending him over double to fit him the way they wanted him in the back seat. They handcuffed him to a neat little metal loop fastened on the floor in back, so that he was forced to ride with his head between his knees. 'You must be crazy,' he told them. 'You don't care what I say.' He turned his head; through the peepsight between his calf and his bent knee he could spot the policeman riding with him in the back. 'You're an anus,' Trumper told him. 'And so's the other one.' He swung his head so that he bumped the back of the driver's seat and drew out a short oath from the driver.

  The back-seat policeman said, 'You take it easy, OK?'

  'You gaping anal pore!' Trumper told him, but the policeman only leaned forward, almost politely inquisitive, as if he hadn't quite heard. 'Your mind has syphilis,' Trumper said, and the policeman shrugged.

  The front-seat policeman asked, 'Doesn't he speak any German? I know he was speaking some German: I heard him, I think. Tell him to speak German.'

  Bogus felt a chill jerk his spine upward and make his hands rattle the handcuffs. I could have sworn I was speaking German!

  In German Trumper shouted, 'You asshole!' Too late to move his head, he saw the black hard-rubber truncheon flick in the policeman's hand.

  Then he heard the radio. A voice said: 'A drunk ...' And he heard his own voice murmur, 'Ich bin nicht betrunken ...' Then he regretted saying anything, seeing the truncheon lash out and hearing the thwock! against his ribs, not really feeing it until his next breath.

  'A drunk,' the radio reported. He tried not to breathe again.

  'Breathe, please ...' said the radio-announcing voice. He breathed, and went cold all over.

  'He went cold all over,' said a recorded whore.

  'You mother,' Trumper mumbled. 'You recorded whore ...' And the truncheon fell across his ribs, his wrists, his kidneys and his mind.

  It took him a long time to swim out to the exact place in the Danube where he could see the underwater tank. Treading water and keeping a landsight on the light at the Gelhafts Keller's dock, he saw the tank's barrel swing up to where he thought he could almost touch it, or where it was perfectly aimed to blast him. Then the tank's top hatch opened, or seemed to, or at least fluttered in the water. Who is down the tank's hatch? Wouldn't somebody be interested to know they were there? But then he thought, I am in a Volkswagen, and if there's a hole in the roof, I am safe with Couth.

  Then the bidets flushed and rinsed his mind.

  Just how long his mind was lost he didn't know, or how fully he'd recovered it by the time he was aware of some more writing in the typewriter before him. He read it, wondering who had written it, poring over it like a letter he'd received, or even like someone else's letter to someone else. Then he saw the dark, crouching figure in the bottom corner of his French windows, and startled himself by suddenly sitting upright and moaning, while simultaneously in the mirroring window, a terrifying gnomelike replica of himself reared up and bleared like a microscopic specimen.

  When he opened the door to the hall, he was met by a sea of faces - whores
with their customers, Frau Taschy and a cop.

  'What's the matter?' several of them said.

  'What?'

  'What's the trouble here?' the cop asked.

  'What were you screaming about?' Frau Taschy asked.

  'Drunk,' a whore whispered.

  Like a recording, Trumper said, 'Ich bin nicht betrunken.'

  'You were screaming, though,' Frau Taschy said. The cop stepped closer, peering behind Bogus into the room.

  But the cop said only, 'Been writing, eh?' Trumper looked for the cop's truncheon. 'What are you looking at?' the cop asked him. He had no truncheon.

  Bogus stepped softly back into his room and closed his door. He stuck his finger in his eye; it hurt. He felt his neck where the whore had bitten him; he felt no pain. His wrists and ribs where he'd been whacked by the truncheon weren't tender.

  Listening to the murmur in the hall outside, he packed. They are willing the door off its hinges. But they weren't; they were only standing there when he came out. He felt that if he didn't take charge, they would take charge of him. So he said with great dignity, 'I'm leaving. It's impossible to work here with all your noise.' To Frau Taschy he held out what he figured to be more than enough money, but she made up some wild tale about his having been there for a couple of months. He felt confused; with the cop right there, he thought he'd better pay her what she asked for. His passport was peeking out of the pocket of his spy suit, and when the cop asked to see it, he nodded to the pocket, making the cop reach in gingerly for it.

  Then Bogus made one last check, just to be sure. 'Merrill Overturf?' he said. 'He's a diabetic?' But no one seemed to respond; in fact, some of the crowd looked away from him, pretending not to hear, as if their embarrassment for him was so great that they feared that at any second he would take off his clothes.

  Outside, the cop followed him for a block or two - waiting, no doubt, to see if he would leap in front of a car or dive through a store window. But Bogus set a brisk pace, walking as if he had in mind some place to go, and the cop fell back and disappeared. Trumper was alone, then, circling the Graben on safe little side streets; it took him a while to locate the Kaffeehaus Leopold Hawelka, and he hesitated before going in, as if he knew everyone who would be there, even as if his search for Merrill had never really progressed beyond his first inquiries here.