“But what?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“That's what I mean,” said the tightly furled man. “The butness of everything. I don't go home any more. Goodbye, little yellow bird. That's the cracks of it, sweetheart.”
“Crux,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Show me a crux and I'll show you the cracks,” said the tightly furled man. “You're not talking to squares now, darling. Don't try to slide by on crossword puzzles and ninety-nine-year leases. The blank spaces are bigger than ziggurats here, and it's a long, long climb. Deeper than a well.”
“Rounder than a wheel?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“You're forcing it, poppet,” said the tightly furled man. “Just let it happen.”
“Don't be a snob,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Look who's talking,” said the tightly furled man. “Him with his lions and his traveler's checks and his cameras. Obesity is the mother of distension. A bitch in time shaved mine. Take the bleeding castles apart and ship them home stone by stone for all I care. Piss off, you and your lion both. Tourists.”
“There's no need to take that tone,” said Jachin-Boaz.
The tightly furled man began to cry. Kneeling on the bed, he bent forward, burying his head in his arms, thrusting out his bottom. “I didn't mean it,” he said. “Let me pet the lion. He can eat my dinner every day.”
Jachin-Boaz turned away, lay back on his bed with his arms behind his head and stared straight up at the ceiling, attempting to find silence and privacy in the space over him that was presumably as wide as his bed, as high as the room, and his personal domain. The sunlight said, Once you begin to doubt you will lose everything. Begin now. “No,” said Jachin-Boaz to the curtains. You will perish, said the red, said the yellow-and-blue flowers. We abide. Many have come and gone here, said the smell of cooking. All have been defeated.
Jachin-Boaz became aware that someone with mental-hospital-doctor feet had arrived at his bed. He had sometimes heard clocks whose tick-tocks became words. When the doctor spoke, his words became tick-tocks unless Jachin-Boaz listened very hard.
“How are we tick-tock today?” said the doctor. “Tick-tock?”
“Very tock, thank you,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Tick,” said the doctor. “Ticks will tock themselves out, I have no doubt.”
“I tick so,” said Jachin-Boaz.
"Tick all right last tock?
“Very tock,” said Jachin-Boaz. “No dreams that I can remember forgetting.”
“That's the ticket,” said the doctor. “Tock it tick.”
“Cheers,” said Jachin-Boaz, making an upward gesture with two fingers.
“You do it the other way for victory,” said the doctor.
“When I see a victory I'll do it that way,” said Jachin-Boaz.
The doctor's feet went away, and the doctor went with them. Civilian feet appeared. Familiar shoes.
“How are you feeling?” said the owner of the bookshop. “Are you all right?”
“Not so bad, thank you,” said Jachin-Boaz. “It's kind of you to come.”
“How come you're here?” said the bookshop owner. “You seem the same as you've always been. Was it the dog-food-eating hallucination?”
“Something like that,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Unfortunately a police constable saw it too.”
“Ah,” said the bookshop owner. “It's always best to keep that sort of thing to yourself, you know.”
“I should like to have kept it to myself,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Things'll sort themselves out,” said the bookshop owner. “The rest will do you good and you'll come back to work refreshed.”
“You don't have any reservations about taking me back?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Why should I? You sell more books than any other assistant I've ever had. Anybody can come unstuck once in a while.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all. Oh, there was an advert in the trade weekly. Letter for you at a box number. Here it is.”
“A letter for me,” said Jachin-Boaz. He opened the envelope. In it was another envelope, postmarked at his town, his town where he had been Jachin-Boaz the map-seller. “Thank you,” he said, and put the letter on his bedside table.
“And here's some fruit,” said the bookshop owner, “and a couple of paperbacks.”
“Thank you,” said Jachin-Boaz. He took an orange from the bag, held it in his hand. The paperbacks were two collections of supernatural and horror stories.
“Escape literature,” said the bookshop owner.
“Escape,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“I'll stop in again,” said the bookshop owner. “Get well soon.”
“Yes,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Thank you.”
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-29-
Only you, said the black water rushing past the ferry in the night.
“Only I what, for God's sake!” said Boaz-Jachin. He saw no one near him, and spoke aloud. He leaned over the rail, smelled the blackness of the sea and cursed the water. “Every fucking thing talks to me,” he said. “Leave me alone for a while. I'll talk to you some other time. I can't be rushed all the time.” He walked aft to the stern, saw flights of white gulls rising and falling in eerie silence above the wake. Out of the darkness into the light. Out of the light into the darkness. Boaz-Jachin shook his fist at the gulls. “I don't even know if he's there!” he said. “I don't even know if I'm looking for him in the right place.”
You know, said the white wings silently rising and falling. Don't tell us you don't know.
“That's what I'm telling you,” said Boaz-Jachin, leaning out over the rail. “I don't know.” He saw no one on the afterdeck, and he began to talk more loudly, to shout into the darkness and the wake. “I don't know! I don't know!” Two gulls slanted towards each other like eyebrows, became for a moment a pale frown following the boat. Boaz-Jachin put one foot on the bottom rail and leaned farther out, staring at the darkness where the white wings had crossed and separated.
He felt a hand gripping his belt from behind. He turned, and was face to face with a woman. His turning had brought her arm halfway around him and their faces close together. She did not let go of his belt.
“What's the matter?” said Boaz-Jachin.
“Come away from the rail,” she said, still holding his belt. Her voice was one that he had heard before. They moved towards the lighted windows of the lounge, and he saw her face clearly.
“You!” he said.
“You know me?”
“You gave me a ride. Months ago it was, on the other side, on the road to the port. You had a red car with a tape machine playing music. You didn't like the way I looked at you.”
She let go of his belt. Under his shirt his flesh burned where her arm had been around him.
“I didn't recognize you,” she said.
“Why did you grab me by the belt?”
“It made me nervous to see you leaning out over the rail that way and shouting into the dark.”
“You thought I was going to jump overboard?”
“It made me nervous, that's all. You look older.”
“You look kinder.”
She smiled, took his arm, walked with him along the deck past the lighted windows. Her breast against his arm made it feel hot.
“Did you think I was going to jump overboard?” said Boaz-Jachin.
“I have a son about your age,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“I don't know. I never hear from him.”
“Where's your husband?”
“With a new wife.”
They walked the deck all the way around the boat, then around again. Hearing her say that her husband was with a new wife was not the same to Boaz-Jachin as the word divorcée that had been in his mind that day on the road.
“You've changed,” she said. “You're less of a boy.”
“More of a man?”
“More of a person. More of a m
an.”
They drank cognac in the bar. In a corridor a group of students with back packs sang while one of them played a guitar. Honey, let me be your salty dog, went the song.
When the boat docked they drove off in the little red car. “Purpose of your visit?” said the customs officer as he looked at Boaz-Jachin's passport.
“Holiday,” said Boaz-Jachin. The customs officer looked at his face and his black hair, then at the blonde woman. He stamped the passport, handed it back.
It was raining, drumming on the canvas top. Numberless splashes leaped up from the road to meet the rain coming down. Red tail-lights blurred ahead of them. Yes, no, yes, no, said the windscreen wipers. The woman put a cassette in the machine. Where the morning sees the shadows of the orange grove there was nothing twenty years ago, sang the tape in the language of Boaz-Jachin's country. Where the dry wind sowed the desert we brought water, planted seedlings, now the oranges grow. A woman's voice, harsh and full of glaring sunlight.
Benjamin, thought Boaz-Jachin. Forgive. “You can buy that on a cassette?” he said.
“Sure,” she said.
Boaz-Jachin shook his head. Why not thought cassettes too? Any kind. What an invention. A slot in the head and you just put in the cassette for the mood you wanted. Lion. Yes, I know, thought Boaz-Jachin. You're in my mind. I'm in your mind.
“Oranges,” said the woman. “Oranges in the desert.” She looked straight ahead into the darkness and the red tail-lights and drove on through the rain. For an hour they said nothing.
She turned off the main road, drove two or three miles to a half-timbered cottage with a thatched roof. Boaz-Jachin looked at her.
“Yes,” she said. “Houses. Houses I have. Three of them in different countries.” She looked at his face. “Last time in the car you were thinking of a hotel, weren't you?”
Boaz-Jachin blushed.
She lit lamps, took covers off the furniture in the living room, went into the kitchen to make coffee. Boaz-Jachin took kindling from a basket, coal from a scuttle, started a fire in the fireplace. The books on the shelves came and went in the firelight, red, brown, orange, all their pages quiet. Thin gleams of gold showed in the insets of picture frames. Boaz-Jachin smelled coffee, looked at the couch, looked away, looked at the fire, sat in a chair, sighed.
They drank coffee. She smoked cigarettes. The silence sat down with them like an invisible creature with its finger to its lips. They looked at the fire. The silence looked at the fire. The fire seethed and whispered. They were both sitting on the floor, on an oriental carpet. Boaz-Jachin looked at the pattern, the asymmetry of the endings of rows and the border. He covered the asymmetry between them by moving close to her. He kissed her, feeling as if he might be struck dead by lightning. She unbuttoned his shirt.
When they were both naked her body was surprising. It was as if not being allowed to be a wife had kept her flesh firm and young. Boaz-Jachin was staggered by the unbelievable reality of what was happening. Again, said the backs of the books, the golden gleams in the picture frames.
My God, thought Boaz-Jachin, and led her to the couch. She turned and hit him in the jaw. She was strong, and it was not a woman's blow. She pivoted athletically, like a boxer, and hit him with her feet planted solidly and all of her weight behind her fist. Boaz-Jachin saw shooting colored lights, then everything went black for a moment as he flew across the room and fetched up in an armchair. He was speechless.
He stood up shakily. Naked she came towards him and hit him in the stomach. All the breath went out of him as she brought up her knee. Blackness and colored lights again, pain and nausea. Boaz-Jachin, rolling on the floor, caught her ankle as she tried to heel-kick him. He pulled, and she came down hard with a thump and a little scream. He crawled over to her on his hands and knees, struck her hard across the face with a backhanded blow. She rolled over on to her side, drew up her knees and lay there crying while her nose bled.
Boaz-Jachin lay beside her until the pain and nausea went away. Then he got up, stirred her with his foot, helped her up, led her to the couch, mounted her as one who had arrived with chariots and spears, and took his pleasure.
“You,” she said into his ear. “Oranges in the desert.”
In the morning there was sunlight. He felt deathless, invincible, the initiate of mysteries, blessed.
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-30-
It would be better for me not to open this letter, thought Jachin-Boaz as he opened the letter. Fading, fading, said the afternoon sunlight slanting down the wall, slanting on the red curtains, on the yellow, on the blue of the flowers. See how tactfully I die! said the sunlight. Twilight follows. Fade with me.
Jachin-Boaz began to read. In the next bed the letter writer was hard at work. Violet's face, for instance, he wrote. Is there, in all justice, any necessity for that? She married the young lieutenant to whom I'd introduced her. Everyone said the baby looked exactly like him. Yet only this morning there was Violet's face in a spoon. Not a silver spoon either. Not even a clean spoon, mind you.
On the other side the tightly furled man was looking at a magazine in which girls in black suspender belts and stockings achieved difficult juxtapositions. He was quietly singing Oft in the Stilly Night in a high falsetto.
The letter writer looked up. The tightly furled man put down his magazine, left off singing. Jachin-Boaz had put the letter in the drawer of his bedside table, flung himself back on his bed, and lay looking up at the ceiling in a silence that filled the air with waves of terror. The two men on either side felt as if they had been fused with the sounding metal of some monstrous bell that was rhythmically annihilating them.
“Stop clanging, can't you?” said the tightly furled man. “It's driving the very marrow out of my bones.” He doubled up in his bed and covered his ears.
“Really,” said the letter writer to Jachin-Boaz, “I think you might have the civility not to indulge in effects like that. I can hear mirrors shattering for miles around. Do make an effort, won't you?”
“I'm sorry,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I didn't know that I was doing anything.” Bad heart, she said. His father had died of a bad heart and he had a bad heart too. He had had twinges now and then, and his doctor had pointed out that he was a cardiac type and would do well to be careful. Suddenly he felt his heart clearly defined in his body, totally vulnerable and waiting for the inevitable. Angina pectoris. Had the doctor said anything about that? He'd looked it up once. Something associated with apprehension or fear of impending death, said the dictionary. He must remember not to be apprehensive or fearful of impending death. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he saw the map of his body with the organs, nerves and circulatory system illuminated in vivid color. The heart pumped, drove the blood through the branching veins and arteries. Around went the blood on the animated map, and around again. It seemed miraculous that the heart kept pumping. How had it continued twenty-four hours a day for forty-seven years? It could never stop for a rest. When it stopped that was the end of everything. No more world. Only a few years left, suddenly they will all be gone, the last moment will be now. Intolerable! Father died at fifty-two. I'm forty-seven. Five more years? Less, perhaps.
You will want to come back to me.
Yes, I do want to come back. Why did I want to go away? What was so bad? Certainly I never felt this bad before.
The letter writer and the tightly furled man got up and went to the lounge. Jachin-Boaz went to one of the nurses, asked for something to calm him down. He was given a tranquillizer, went back to his bed and reasoned with himself.
She can't actually make my heart stop, he thought. That kind of magic doesn't work unless you believe that the other person has the power. Do I believe she has the power? Yes. But she doesn't really have any special power. She didn't have the power to keep me, did she? No. Then could she have the power to kill me? Of course not. Do I believe that? No.
Jachin-Boaz lay with his ear to th
e pillow, listening to the beating of his heart. The map, he thought. The map of Boaz-Jachin's future that I stole, the future that I cannot have. I'll stop smoking.
He lit a cigarette, got out of bed, stood against the wall. As soon as I feel a little better, he thought, I'll stop smoking. My father with his cigars. Why did she have to tell me about the mistress? She found out from her aunt in the dramatic society, but why did she have to tell me?