—Sorry about your sneakers, Libbets said.
He didn’t know what to say. He kissed her once on the lips, tasted the rank contents of her stomach. Kissed her just because he wanted to be unafraid of this simple biological event now and because he wanted to prove he could kiss her gently, like a decent guy.
He bore her up, out of the cab, held her up past the doormen, caressed her in the elevator, caressed the small of her back, and led her into her room. She went into the bathroom and vomited again, almost daintily this time. Paul gagged, too, as though he were going to spill his own guts in sympathy. He heard her shit after that, too, a torrent of insubstantial, watery stuff. He realized he couldn’t remember ever having heard a woman shit before. Libbets was still crying. These were the sounds in the Casey household, Libbets’s diarrhea, her choking sobs, and, in the next room, Davenport snoring in Libbets’s sister’s room. Davenport had moved. Sleepwalked, maybe. The sound of the snoring carried through the apartment like the country sound of a chain saw.
She was in her nightgown now, when she came out of the bathroom, and his eyes lit on her little woven anklet. And when she was backlit by the bedside lamp, her curvy shape shimmered in her transparent nightgown. She got under the covers.
—Are you feeling okay? he said.
—Much better, she mumbled. Gotta quit mixing things, I guess.
—Thanks for the night, Paul said. It was really a wonderful night.
—Mmm.
He went on:
—I never get to see much of New York City. I don’t come in much. We used to come in with my dad at Christmastime. Once we came to see the circus. Three rings, couldn’t tell where to look. Totally fried. But now I don’t get into the city too much and you know, well, I don’t have that many friends either so it’s not too often—
It was like throwing a switch, the way she free-fell into unconsciousness. One moment she was there and the next, gone. She was a ghostly and beautiful sleeper, almost invisible, curled in the delicate question-mark shape Paul would have imagined for her.
He asked if he could just rest with her in the bed for a minute. Just for a minute, really, then he had to catch the train. Just to help her off to sleep and everything. When he got no reply, he removed his wet Top-Siders—speckled with puke and slush—and then his khakis. In his checkered boxer shorts—no self-respecting man of St. Pete’s wore briefs—he climbed into bed with Libbets Casey.
He meant only to curl his arm around her and to feel for her the sentiment that parents feel for helpless little kids. He meant only to help, to feel that he could help. And when she rose and fell in the little drama of respiration, her breasts brushing up against his arm, when he brushed back her dirty-blond hair and touched his palm to her forehead, he knew that his life wasn’t here to be squandered. This was the thing that anybody could do. He knew the comedy of the human body. He could share it. And it didn’t matter for a moment that Libbets was unlikely to do the same for him. It didn’t matter. This was where the storm worked its change on him. He was ready to do a little service.
But instead, his erection began to rub against Libbets’s voluptuous ass. He knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t admitting it. He was feeling virtuous. His dick was making its own decisions, ones that involved chiefly sorrow and shame. His dick didn’t give a shit about the community of lost teenagers. It only took a minute or so—he had hiked up her nightgown and was rubbing against her very flesh—before he was teetering on the brink of that fantastic and sorrowful ecstasy. What really gave masturbation its thrill was the possibility of getting caught at it at the moment of orgasm, when you knew that Jimmy Rodale, for example, was going to tell everyone in Manville that you used a nylon soccer jersey to accomplish the deed. Or getting caught by your mother. That cry of release was like no other—I wish I were in love! I’m never gonna be!
But Paul was gifted with a sudden moment of insight. He could see that the lovely cheeks of her ass, her coccyx, her knobby lower vertebrae, the breasts he held in his hand, would not bring him the good feeling he wanted. He could see what kind of creep he was. He would be no more there afterward than he was before. He was no sensuous man. And there was no colony on this planet where this kind of activity was rewarded. This insight was nothing more than a jab in the midst of the precipitous movement toward ejaculation.
He managed to roll over onto his side, though. To save himself a little heartbreak.
—Oh, Libbets, he groaned.
And he came. By himself. On himself. On his hand, and on Libbets’s sheets.
Instantly, he was out of bed, checking the clock, his heart racing, looking for his clothes. Was he high? Was he a fool? Was he a deviant? He sprinted to the bathroom, where he gave his hands a good washing. He grabbed a flowered towel and rushed with it back to the bed. Libbets slept. He scrubbed at the puddle not a foot from her back. She rolled backward, from the commotion maybe, so that she was only inches away. He whispered apologies. He scorched the fitted sheet with scrubbing friction. It wasn’t going to come out so easily. There were little clots of the stuff. It would just have to dry. He prayed that his semen would not make that journey of eight inches across the sheet and into Libbets’s vagina. He prayed it would fade by morning. He prayed it would be transformed into the flaky and inoffensive crust he knew so well.
It was almost eleven. Had Davenport heard? The snoring had stopped. Paul’s life was cheap. He dressed. He looked for his magazines. He was as alone in that apartment as he could be. A world of sleepers kept his secret. How could he sit across from Libbets in M. LeJeune’s french class? How could he herald the birth of baby Jesus in a month’s time? How could he ring in the fabulous year of 1974?
The best thing to do was to attempt to adhere to his normal daily schedule in all other areas of his life. To come and go according to his habits; the best thing to do was to catch the train as planned; to return to New Canaan as planned; to have breakfast with his parents as planned; to try to bask in the company of his parents, to try to learn the lessons of family; to catch the train back to Boston on Sunday, as planned, and from there catch the bus to Concord; to go to chapel on Monday morning as required; to attend Origins of the West, Geometry One, Chemistry One, English Five, and French Four as though nothing concerned him more than the usual battery of exams and the stress of selecting the correct St. Pete’s bumper sticker for his parents’ station wagon for Xmas. The slim rewards of habit would be his.
His clothes were straightened out (though he was dripping slightly into his pants), his tweed jacket was buttoned. His penis hurt. He leaned over Libbets’s shoulder to grace the clean, broad plane of her cheekbone. She slipped halfway out of delirium.
—Mmmnn, Libbets said.
And then she sank again. He muttered another apology, as if words were going to do the trick.
Paul Hood begged his cab driver to make it to Grand Central Terminal by 11:00. This required haste. The grand avenue they hurtled down couldn’t impress him now. Nor could the snow and sleet drifting in the streetlamps like ash from an incinerator. He was unaware. He had plunged himself into the netherworld of troubled adolescents. He wasn’t a man at all. He was a boy. A privileged kid. His parents could get him out of what he had done. He would go to Silver Meadow. His dad had money. His dad could pay for psychiatric treatment. His dad would turn up during visiting hours with fresh socks. His dad would ferry him home to Silver Meadow after he got thrown out of St. Pete’s. His dad would ferry him into that subspace of forgotten perverts.
He was at the ticket window by ten minutes past, and he slipped between the doors on the train just before they closed. A dozen other burnouts, including some older guys he thought he remembered from public school—bar drinkers and lonely souls—were strewn around the empty car. When the train began to roll, Paul Hood laid himself out lengthways on the three-seater like a corpse on the marble mortuary slab.
And in that first moment of repose, he remembered issue #141 of The Fantastic Four. Like a dese
rt oasis to him. Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless, these, Paul Hood’s people, were the proper readers of Marvel comics.
To recap: In issue #140, Annihilus was busy trying to take control of the world. Natch. This was all happening in the Negative Zone, that universe beside our own, where the laws of nature were subtly altered. Annihilus was a sort of insect—a late-model Gregor Samsa—who had been transformed through the agency of some extinct Negative Zone creatures, called Hereroes, into a winged, metallic fighting machine in pursuit of immortality. The control of the universe was his goal. The means to this end, in Annihilus’s view, was none other than the F.F. In particular, he intended to sap the powers of young Franklin Richards, who was being held in the country by his mother, Sue—away from Reed, her husband, who never gave enough time to his child, who was no kind of father or husband.
Agnes Harkness, Sue’s former governess, had been hypnotized by Annihilus into leading Sue and Franklin to the Negative Zone. Reed, Johnny, Ben, and Medusa—who had assumed Sue’s spot on the team way back in issue #112—and Johnny’s old college roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot, followed.
Most of the issue, though, was just a setup. Annihilus narrated at length his origins to Wyatt Wingfoot. This was the kind of issue that had no purpose but to insure that Paul Hood would purchase the next. Which brought Paul to #141.
Reed was set to rescue his estranged wife and son. He was half-crazy with paternal and marital loyalty. Paul had never seen him so frenzied, so … irrational. Yet as the issue opened, Annihilus had immobilized Reed and the rest of the team in some kind of antigravity paralysis. “You brought us here for a reason, Annihilus,” Reed cried out to the insect. “Revenge was part of it—but so is my son. What is it you want with him?”
Meanwhile, Alicia Masters, the blind girl who loved Benjamin Grimm was traveling to Latveria, to try to find a cure for her blindness.
The F.F. escaped from their suspended animation—they just did—and were soon walking the surface of Annihilus’s desolate planet. They fought off and befriended the telepathic aliens who lived there. And they tunneled through the rock under their foe’s fortress. Soon they had managed to penetrate the laboratory chamber where Sue, Agnes Harkness, and Franklin Reed were being held in an enormous test tube.
These last eight pages were enough to lift Paul Hood from the murky bog of self-recrimination. As the cover promised, little Franklin was indeed glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB! It began with this light in his eyes, this internal and eternal cosmic power raging in him. Galaxies, endless expanses of primordial creation, were spread before him like mere toys. Medusa, Johnny, and Ben launched Annihilus into a tomb of corroded machinery. It was that simple. The stage was set for the final act of this grave domestic tragedy.
Reed wanted to get them all back to N.Y.C., where he could use his untested antimatter device to try to stabilize Franklin. Using a bogus spell in bogus dimeter, Agnes Harkness transported them back to the city. Reed rushed off to find his invention. “Wait, Medusa,” Sue suddenly cried, “what is he doing? That looks like some sort of gun! No—Reed, no!”
When Paul reached the panels on the bottom half of page thirty-one, it was as if the entire day, the entire vacation even, were leading up to a single moment. He felt certain then that Stan Lee was in some direct communication with the universe—in the way, say, that The Watcher, that most mysterious Marvel character, was content like some Gnostic entity merely to know of the machinations of creation—and that through Lee’s spiritually advanced vision, Paul’s own destiny was entrapped in the monthly serializations of these kitschy superheroes. He seemed both influenced and influencer in the world of Marvel.
So Reed blasted his son. In his haste and confusion, he used an untested weapon with all the ionizing force of antimatter particles on his own son. The alien glow in Franklin’s eyes dimmed, ending the danger of the moment, dimming in him the ancient soup of the Big Bang. But with it went the life in Franklin’s eyes, the twinkle of his joyous and questing cognition. To be replaced by darkness.
“What have you done, Reed? You’ve turned your own son into a vegetable. Your own son!…”
The last panel showed them all—Sue, with Franklin in her arms like some lifeless marionette, Wyatt Wingfoot, Johnny Storm, Medusa, and Ben—turned away from Reed. Reed, devastated, wordless at the enormity of his slaughter. The end of the Fantastic Four. The end. Until next month.
Then the lights on the train dimmed, sputtered, and fell dark. The engine rolled casually to a stop. Paul knew, having logged a number of hours on the New Haven line, that this was just part of electrical train travel. But after ten minutes in emergency lighting he wasn’t as sure. Soon these lights, too, began to dim. Ominous darkness. A conductor hurried past Paul’s seat, carrying a flashlight, and the other sleepers in his car stirred, turning restlessly, as though, in their dreams, they were being roasted on spits. Out the window, Paul could see the lights along I-95, where the slush was piled far into the lanes. The train was disabled somewhere between Port Chester and Greenwich. The snow fell, a relentless piece of bad news, and the cars crawled along, skidding and spinning. This wasn’t a simple delay. When the conductor appeared at the end of the car and gave them the news—’Fraid we got a downed power line, hope to have it fixed shortly—mumbling because he no more believed the news than did the restless sleepers in that car, Paul knew he was here to stay.
So he dredged the awful bottom of his loneliness, because the train was as void and still as a sensory-deprivation tank. There was nothing else to do.
He had been on every platform on the Connecticut section of the ride. He had carved his initials in the men’s room in Greenwich; he had sat on the fenders of the station cars parked in Darien; he had snuck into the bars in Cos Cob, urinated on the bushes by the station in Westport, flirted with the little girls in Rowayton and Old Greenwich. And he had traversed the southwestern part of the state by car on I-95. It was a noxious artery, more like an intestine, really, a bearer of wastes and bacteria. He knew the hotel between Darien and Stamford that had a Nixon banner on it all through the election; he knew the exact location of each and every HoJo’s between here and New Haven; he knew Norwalk Harbor and Five Mile River and Cos Cob Harbor, and the bridges there; he knew the way I-95 came down a hill into Norwalk, the way it divided in New Haven, he knew its view of the Baxter Building as the train pulled into downtown Stamford.
He knew all this, but it didn’t change his situation. His short, privileged life on the golden corridor of Fairfield County made no difference to the storm outside. It was different when you were being driven through these towns, or when you were just idling in the train stations for an hour or two. Now he was stranded. He was a stranded kid, a kid on the verge of not being a kid anymore. A kid who would be getting his license soon. A loser from a family of losers. And he was near Port Chester, the only stop on the New Haven line that had a lot of Afro-American residents.
Paul Hood had met a few of them, black people. Though there were none in his elementary school—East School—there were five in Saxe Junior High when he was there. They all came from the middle of town, from the rented rooms above Fat Tuesday’s or Pic-a-Pants. Three of them were girls, and they kept pretty much to themselves. When he looked back in his yearbook, in fact, he could never really remember seeing them at all. Except maybe eating cafeteria pizza in a little lunchroom clump. Probably they were so scared they skipped school. The guys, on the other hand, the two black guys were unavoidable. Brian Harris ruled Saxe Junior High. He wore his hair long, in a Black Panther Afro, and this spooked everybody. And he was a superior athlete, but maybe only because every white kid in New Canaan had been brought up to believe that Afro-Americans were superior athletes. This was something Paul’s dad had actually told him. In basketball, Brian Harris had developed this double-pump reverse lay-up thing that some white guys were trying hard to copy. All he had to do was walk to the basket—they just let him through. Harris was a walking god in Saxe Junior High.
A superhero. They worshiped him.
The other black guy was Logan Krieg and he had a reading problem or something. He had constantly looked over Paul’s shoulder in English class. Krieg panicked visibly in class. When he began coming into school drunk or wasted, only the teachers were surprised. Krieg turned all the letters around in his assignments. He wrote baby writing. And then he pleaded with guys he didn’t even know, with white students, to cover up for him. Because he was trying to stay out of the special-ed class. He didn’t want to be in class with the retards. They all knew he was lying in class, lying about having done the homework, lying about having been sick, lying all the time, caught in this thick web of deceits, until he was immobilized by it. And then he was gone. Dropped out, shipped off somewhere, who knew? He wasn’t friends with anybody, really.
That was Paul’s experience with black kids. There were a few at St. Pete’s and they all stuck together, too. They were brilliant and militant. For the rest of his information, Paul had to rely on reports from the idiot box. The Rookies had a black actor on it, and there was Sanford and Son. And in the dimly lit mausoleum that was his 11:10 Stamford Local, he remembered watching the news one night with his father, the night Angela Davis was acquitted. From the Naugahyde reclining chair that was his dad’s chief consolation, Benjamin called out listessly, drunkenly, at the screen: Fucking communist dyke cunt—
Port Chester—where he was stranded—was something else altogether. Had Paul been able to leave the train then, to walk beneath its glittering electromagnetic force field, he would have trod streets without a white face on them. He had heard about places like this. These streets were the reason, probably, that his mother had repeatedly told him, when he was a kid, about a friend of hers who had set about crossing the railroad tracks. He had climbed up over an electric train, this boy, shortcutting from one side of the town to the other, and, on top of the train he had stood. To get a better view, maybe, or to feel the aggrandizement of standing on a train. But he had died in the process, of course. This story was where Paul had learned about electromagnetism. Because when the guy stood up he hit the voltage lines. The lines running over the train.