There came to him an insight. His path had diverted from common reality and entered uncommon reality. He might be off in this fog, lost here at least for a time, but it was a grand fog.
Within it there were fearsome discoveries to be made, but also he was closer to the old immortalities. Saints and the innocent of God had been here, the geniuses of the surreal like Francis of Assisi and friend Kafka.
He had to break the tension between himself and Monica. His passion would not be satisfied by some hurried roll on her rug, indeed not by any physical thing. It was too deeply of the body to be appeased by the decorative rituals that have grown up around the act of procreation. Maybe giving her a child would wet his fires a little, but he did not want his fires wetted. He had to see this through.
A new experience had claimed him.
She, though, still assumed him to be part of the old reality. Her eyes were wet, her lips parted. Her fingers took his cheeks and guided his mouth to her mouth. He turned away and her kiss came to his cheek.
"Bob?"
"Monica, this is not—"
"Hush. Don't say it." She dropped her eyes, her head, knelt, then crouched before him like an Egyptian at the feet of Pharaoh. He heard constricted sobs. But the constriction began failing, the sobs growing louder. She had come to her own darkness, here in this lovely room, with the late sun bathing the cathedral below the windows. She was seeing full how close she was to the mysteries that her ancient sisters in magic had celebrated with potions and flying ointment and broomsticks. So close, and yet denied. Her science, in seeking to penetrate the heart, locked the heart.
He felt sure that she had just at this moment discovered her own fraud. As softly, as gently as he could, Bob rose. He stepped over Monica's crouching form. He left this soul to the privacy of its discovery.
There was no point in trying any longer to escape. Not Monica, not her pills, nothing could help him. If there was a guide, he would find it in the black letters of the past, the Mabinogion, the Little Flowers of St. Francis, the Metamorphosis.
Bob Duke had come to the center of the forest. There was no sound, not even wind. The path was not marked by moon or stars or prior passage. All around him the eyes, the fangs, the claws of another world—the wild and true world— gathered themselves.
As evening settled over New York St. Patrick's Cathedral raised its bells. He started off through their glassine clamor and at the same time through this silent forest in his soul. Now he was alone.
Chapter Six
THE ENCOUNTER LEFT BOB DESPERATE FOR TYLENOL, and he was glad when he was finally riding the old elevator up to his own apartment. Lupe drove it, one-eyed, silent Lupe who had been here since this building was called "The Montague House" and dressed its doormen and elevator operators in tan uniforms with gold braid. Now there was only Lupe, and he rarely wore his shaggy formals. They were reserved for Christmas, or if there was a wedding party in the building, or a wake.
Lupe never talked. He had stopped talking, the old-timers said, back when the Dodgers had left Brooklyn. Mrs. Trask in 14C remembered Lupe's last words: "Too sad."
Lupe's last words, Mrs. Trask . . . the life and history of the building. Mrs. Trask also remembered when your maid piled your dirty sheets on the dumbwaiter and sent them down to the laundry, which was staffed by six Chinese. "At Christmas we gave twenty-eight tip envelopes, a dollar each. Our rent was forty-one dollars a month. Let me tell you, young man, this place was class with a capital K."
Lupe pulled back the rattling brass cage. "Thanks, Lupe." Bob heard, and disliked, the superior drone in his own voice. "I need about twelve Tylenols," he said as he went through the door into his dark, silent apartment. "Hello?"
There was a scrabbling sound from the bedroom.
He went down the hall. "Cindy?"
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in the dark, smoking. He was stunned. To his knowledge, she had never smoked. "What's the matter?"
"We have thirty days to go in this apartment. Jennie called from the bank, we're eight hundred dollars overdrawn. I spent all afternoon at the welfare office trying to get food stamps, and we can't get them because we've already made too much money this year. So I bought a pack of Salems and I've been sitting here ever since smoking them and get me some money or leave me alone!"
He stepped back as if a snake had lashed its head in his direction. Her breath hissed between her teeth.
She was hurting, and he loved her, but he could not comfort her. The source could not melt the pain. Still, there must be something to say.
"We—"
"No, Bob."
He held out his arms. She looked at him, and for a moment she seemed to be gazing at him through the bars of a cage. Gazing in. Her beauty flowed in the dark.
"Don't come any closer, Bob, unless you've got money."
"I went to Monica. She made me take pills—"
"We need money more than we need you sane! Why didn't you rob a bank and then go to Monica?"
"They rape you in prison."
"Forty-year-old men with Jell-0 around the middle? I hardly think so."
"I've forgotten how to make money. Why don't you work?"
"Doing what? Taking in wash? Pumping gas? Scrubbing floors for our friends? I'm equipped for nothing. A drone. A victim of the culture." She laughed silently, mirthlessly, her cigarette bobbing like a little red lantern. "I've been paying for being a woman all my life, and now I'm really going to pay, I guess." The bobbing stopped. "That's what being a woman's all about. You're born, therefore you pay."
What did she mean? Was she referring to pregnancy? They had used the Lamaze Method for Kevin, working as a team, two shouting, screaming people in the University Hospital birthing ward, and afterward she said it hadn't been so bad.
She stubbed her cigarette out on the bottom of her sandal and aimed the butt at the trash can. "Bob, I've loved you so much. More than I ever thought I'd love anybody. You have a decency about you, honey, that's just so sweet. You're the only thoroughly good person I've ever met. You wouldn't hurt anything. I don't think you've ever even killed a fly." She sobbed. "Is that why you're such a failure? Why we're always broke?"
"Actually, I think I might have something with the Macintosh Office concept. I'm planning on hitting my old client list, making some cold calls—"
"Shh! Honey, don't belabor the absurd. Just leave it alone. We have no money. This is who we are. We are the We Have No Moneys. 'Hello, this is Mrs. We Have No Money. I'd like to get a credit line, please.'"
"We have MasterCard. Gold American Express—"
"Used up, used up."
"Maybe the bank—"
"They don't have time to assist the indigent."
"Something will turn up." He smiled at her, giving it his biggest, his brightest. Maybe somebody would take the apartment, maybe they wouldn't even be able to get food, but this love they had was bigger than a roof over your head or a meal.
Or, actually, maybe that was taking it a little too far. The love was big. But food and shelter were also big.
"I was poor as a kid and poor when we first married. The rest of the time I've worked the float. Just for one month, for one week, I'd like to have enough money. Get it. Get it now!" She grappled with another cigarette, lit it, and smoked with amateur fury. White streams roared out her nose.
He took all he had out of his wallet and laid the three one-dollar bills on the bed before her,
"Wonderful. Kevin and I can go out and share a Coke and a burger at the Greek's."
The numbers on that didn't quite work, but Bob thought it better not to mention it. They could get a grilled cheese sandwich in lieu of the hamburger and still have enough change for dessert from the Muscular Dystrophy gum machine beside the cashier's counter.
Bob's body seemed to churn and boil, as if he was turning under his skin to the consistency of a milkshake.
He was changing right here in the bedroom! He had to get out of here. "Isn't that music?" he asked, de
sperate to conceal his inner turmoil.
She sighed. It must be obvious to her that his voice was not right, and she probably knew why. "Kevin's got a friend over."
"I think I'll go say hello." He took a long step back. He quivered, goo in a sack of skin.
"Bob?"
"Yes?"
"Is that a dance you're doing or what?"
"The music—"
"You don't do the frug to the 'Blue Danube.'" Backing away from Cindy was an evasion, of course. He should go to her, and let her spend her rage on him and then ask her for the blessings of the night, but he had not the courage. Over the years of their marriage she had remade herself in an image he preferred, but now that he couldn't pay her way anymore she was back to her old self, the real Cindy—a stranger he had from time to time glimpsed in moments of rage or passion. There were jets of rebellion flaring.
And yet—and this was the most awful part— the strangeness of her anger was what was making her attractive. Her rage was a fierce aphrodisiac.
All the rules were changed; reality had come unstuck, danger and the unexpected now reigned.
His bones shifted, scuttling beneath his skin. Step-by-step he backed down the hall. Cindy snorted, a derisive, cutting noise. The light streaming from under Kevin's door was yellow and rich.
He had to hide, to get away, to save his family from this absurd horror—
His bones were oozing in his skin, his muscles bubbling as if they were carbonated glue.
He stumbled, fell against Kevin's door, lurched into the room.
The whole place was done up in blue construction paper. From Kevin's record player there blared the "Blue Danube." He was waltzing around and around with a girl in his arms.
"Dad!" They stopped waltzing.
The girl held out a soft, child-fat hand, smiled around a bucking reef of teeth. "Pleased to meetcha."
To take the hand Bob had to concentrate all of his attention on his own arm, force it forward, scream in his head for his fingers to open. Then he had to draw his hand back, which was like pulling against a cold river. The arm wanted to go straight out before him, the hand to crunch and twist itself into a new form.
This must not be allowed to happen, not here, not now. But he wanted to, his body wanted to, it had wanted to all day, to just burst its old skin and become the new, magic self that belonged to the wild.
Both children looked at him, the little girl's face flickering fear, Kevin's a mix of amusement and concern,
"Dad, have you got a sore throat?"
"Rrr—no!"
"Then why do you keep growling?"
"Your dad is really weird."
He finally managed to lurch out, caught himself leaning forward toward all fours, scuttled into the living room, and hit the phone. He fluttered through Cindy's directory, a pretty cream-colored book with roses pressed in the Lucite cover that Kevin had made last summer at camp. Here was Monica's home number. Thank God, what a convenience when your wife and your psychiatrist are such good friends, no need to gabble to some gum cracker at an answering service. Ring. Please. Ring. Oh, please. Ring. "Monica, thank God you're home."
"Who is this?"
"Bob; I need help."
"Are you hurt?"
"No, Monica, I'm changing. I swear."
"You sound like you've got a mouthful of Brillo or something."
"I swear, my whole body—Monica, it isn't a psychological problem, it's real. I've got to have help."
"Can you come to my office?"
"Please, I don't think I can get out of the apartment."
"Is Cindy there?"
"They're both here. And a little friend of Kevin's."
"Give me ten minutes, Bob." She hung up. He slumped over the phone, breathing deeply, trying for control, clutching his chest, huddling in on himself. Evening light gathered to waltz time from Kevin's room. Bob crept into the darkest corner he could find, the coat closet.
His body gave itself to its rebirth. He wrenched and quivered, saw waves passing through his muscles, felt the grinding reorganization of his bones. His organs seemed to have become detached from their moorings. They swooped on cold comet tracks down new paths inside him, freezing and burning at the same time, while he gasped and gargled, trying not to scream.
"Tales from the Vienna Woods" gave way to the "Acceleration Waltz," and the pop of a bottle of fizzy apple juice. Bob stared at the faint light coming under the door of the coat closet. He darted his ears toward the rustling sound of movement—Cindy was coming down the hall. Now she was in the living room. "Bob?"
He pressed back against the wall. The smell of overcoats filled his nose: his own coat smelled of moldy money. Perhaps that ten dollars he had lost had worked its way down into the lining. There was a faint aroma of Paco Rabanne coming from Cindy's coat. Either she had taken to using it or had walked arm in arm with a man who did.
Didn't Monica's husband use it? That, or Aramis. Bob did not care for fragrances on his own body. His ears followed Cindy as she came to the center of the room. The light increased. She had turned on the lamp over by the TV. "Bob?"
The downstairs buzzer sounded, blasting the silence in the closet, making Bob chortle out an involuntary growl of surprise. Cindy came across the room, lifted the receiver of the intercom. "Yes?"
"Cyn, it's me."
"Oh, Monica, come in."
A few moments later they embraced with swishes and a ripple of ginger kissing. "Why did you come?"
"He phoned. Where is he?"
"I think he went out."
Light burst into his eyes. There stood Cindy holding Monica's airy mink. She dropped the coat. "Bob, my God."
Monica appeared, a dark mask before the light. She squatted down, reached in and took his face in warm, firm hands. She drew him out into the blinking light. The waltz music had stopped. Briefly his eyes met his son's, the boy standing at the far end of the room. "Is this for real?" his playmate asked.
"Kafka," Kevin said, "the Metamorphosis."
"Look at his teeth." Cindy's voice was analytical, the tone of someone so fascinated that for a moment they have forgotten to be upset. Then she fully realized what she was seeing, signified by the fact that her skin went corpse gray.
He tried to raise his arm, to touch what he sensed as a numb disfigurement of his lower face. His right arm shot out before him. It was short, the sleeve of his shirt drooping around it. The fist at the end of it was so tight it felt like it had been strapped to itself with cord. His palm was hot, his finger joints oozing red pain.
"It's a hysterical reaction," Monica said crisply. "Get him down on the floor. Get his clothes off. We've got to massage those limbs before he loses his circulation."
"What do you mean, a hysterical reaction? Look at him, he's—oh, Bob, oh, my baby!"
"The body can do wonders. You wouldn't believe what some patients look like. Especially from the East. Indians. You'd swear they'd half turned into monkeys, the way they contort themselves. It's nothing that modem psychiatry can't handle, of that much I can assure you. A few months on a Thorazine drip, a course of electroshock, and he'll seem fine."
"Months! Monica, we have no money. He can't go into the hospital, he has to work."
"I'm sorry. This is a classic case of avoidance. He can't handle his problems, can't face his responsibilities. It's a fortress mentality."
"Mother, his teeth are actually growing."
He heard all of this with absolute clarity as Monica and Cynthia undressed him. Through eyes that had gone to vague colors and shades of gray he watched his son and the little girl standing hand in hand at his feet. "Don't cry, Kevin, I'm gonna—"
Kevin clapped his hands over his ears. "He sounds like a dog!"
"Rub, Cindy." Their fingers raced along his arms and legs, raced and kneaded. Within his limbs there was a continuous churning, and it was getting worse. He delivered himself to their efforts but it was no good, not really. He was slipping, sliding through their fingers. His wife's ha
nds were soft and cool and dry, Monica's damp and warm. Their manipulations were beautiful agony.
It faded like rain fades, and the rubbing of skin against skin was replaced by the whisper of fingers in fur.
"Oh, God, Monica, what's the matter with him!"
Monica lifted her hands as if she was being burned. A rictus twisted her face, her teeth gleaming behind tight lips, her eyes beaded to amber chips. Then a great force seemed to descend upon her and she controlled her face. Her lips were a line of wire. Young Kevin had moved away. His girlfriend was huddling in a ball beside the TV. Kevin's tape had recycled and the "Blue Danube" now filled the room.
A passing fire truck wailed. Bob, lying on his back, slowly windmilling arms and legs that no longer worked right, heard a voice from the street call out, "Artie, don't forget. . ." Then again, "They'll kill you if you do. . ." Somebody laughed. High in a window a pale star shone down.
Bob wished he could fly out into the wild emptiness between here and that star. His heart almost burst with longing and he cried aloud. A sound drowned the waltz, making Kevin cover his ears and stare with stricken eyes, making Cindy beat her fists against his chest, making Monica gather him in her arms and press her warm, soft cheek against the cold wall of teeth that half formed his new face.
The sound he made felt in his chest like flying, it was so high and rich and full. He would have thought such a voice would reach the stars, but when his breath ran out, the world was still exactly the same. Or, not quite. The little girl had gone to her knees facing the wall, and was loudly praying the Confetior.
"Bob," Monica whispered, "Bob, it's all right. I know you're still in there. I must tell you that I don't know exactly what's happening here but there must be some rational, perfectly sensible reason that explains this. I want you to know that you are not alone. I am with you. I will help you."