Authors: Thomas Williams
The young woman got off at the
eighth floor, not having looked at him, and he waited for the
elevator to close its doors, hesitate, and then, with worn mechanical
suddenness, rise.
His eyes insisted that they knew
what was vertical, but before he reached his room his shoulder hit
the corridor wall several times. After the business of the key and
lock he got into the room and nearly missed the bed he chose to fall
upon, holding himself upon its canted surface with a desperate swing
of his arm. The damask texture of the bedspread against his cheek was
the only normal, almost reassuring, signal from outside his head.
The room tilted slowly to the
left until it was nearly on its side and then, with no apparent
return or change, was vertical and as remorselessly tilting to the
left again. Nausea came precisely at the impossible return, then
subsided as the tilt progressed, only to begin again, each time
a little stronger, as the room, with no sound or stress, was vertical
and again beginning its tilt. He crawled to the bathroom and knelt
upon the stained hexagonal tiles, put his face over the ancient
toilet and emptied himself of chunks and bitter brown liquids.
How long? he wondered. How long? Not to be nauseated; that would be a
great gift. To be neither anxious nor nauseated—what a
wonderful gift that would be.
When he thought he was empty he
crawled back to the bed on his soiled knees, his hands still shaped
by the cold saline rim of the toilet.
In the night he awoke, only the
distant rhythms of the city, crashes and horns so muted they had lost
all insistence, calling from beyond the brown canyons of the
Biltmore. The amber room was stable and the nausea was gone. At first
he lay still, his mind free of all the events of the past, and
enjoyed the smoothness and neutrality of balance. What was level
was level without thought, even though he was in a small cubicle on
the tenth floor of a huge and doubtful structure built on an island
that was itself unstable, lying as it did near a long fault in the
system of continents. All could dissolve into rubbish at any
moment. Then the recent past was back with all of its black and
white, no amelioration, no making the best of it. No, he was at least
free. There must be some value in that.
In the morning he called Martin
Troup and said he was going home. He would need to do some research
on the article, which would deal with construction, Manhattan, the
bodies crushed, wounded and bereft, and he would have it done in a
week. Martin said two weeks would be okay and wished him well. Then
he called Robin Flash and told him. Robin had been to his developer
already that morning and it seemed the kids had fooled with his
strobe and half the pictures taken in Marjorie's apartment were
underexposed, so he'd have to go back and do them over.
"Will you be down here
again, Luke?" Robin asked.
"Sometime, anyway,"
Luke said. "I'm going to sell my house but I'll be there for a
few days. I'll let you and Martin know where I'll be."
"Marjorie's going to be
disappointed not to see you again, man."
"Oh, come on, Robin."
Robin laughed, and his voice was
still precarious with mirth when they hung up.
Luke called Ham Jones at his
office in Wellesley and told him to go ahead with the sale; he'd take
the noon shuttle and be back this afternoon. With all this done he
felt a sense of accomplishment. He would finish the article because
he'd said he would. That was now settled, and although he had no way
in mind to get into it, he'd always been able to write five thousand
words. He'd just do it and get it over with. It would be about
nightmare but it wouldn't be nightmare to do because he would sit
down and do it, if he had to, out of the cold skill of his
profession. In it would be the black man on Broadway screaming
silently, the din, the fouled air, the stupid inefficiency and
impermanence, and in the foreground in a different light the clear
faces of the people. Maybe—if he saw clarity there when he
came to look more closely, when memory increased and made its
surprising juxtapositions and comparisons. He would see, but he would
have to do the work that made him see, letting the words lie as
little as possible. The weight of that task hovered over him as he
prepared to leave the old hotel.
At eleven-fifteen he sat at a
small bar in La Guardia near the entrance to the shuttle,
holding a bourbon and water in his hand. He looked across the bar to
the dim, rusty-colored mirror behind the bottles, where he saw a man
leaning over a bourbon and water, looking back at him. Was that man
drinking because he needed the drug to reduce anxiety, or was he
using the anxiety as an excuse for drinking? He wished it
weren't necessary to keep asking that question. He must change his
life.
Finally he did go through it
all—the electronic arch, the tunnel, the entrance into the long
machine, the wait, the rumbly taxiing, the demeaning thrust and whine
of the takeoff. There were no incidents other than the ghost
ones that could have happened at any stage, that he monitored as if
his nerves were split into the monitoring systems of the
airplane. In an anxious limbo, he wondered how boredom and fear could
be so mixed. Then the descent, and the landing upon the precious,
stable earth. Ugly or not, cemented and asphalted to the
horizons or not, it was terra firma and he would take it.
On the way to Wellesley in his
three-year-old station wagon, in the statistically greater danger of
traffic, his own systems calmed somewhat, and later in the afternoon
he stood in the shaded driveway beside his house, in the lush
vibrations of summer.
The house was more or less like
the others in the neighborhood, and was what Helen had
wanted—modern, mostly at the back where the window-walls looked
out upon lawn and hedge, but in front shingled and dark stained, with a low, eaved, bungalowish look among the plantings.
A female hummingbird worked in
the bee balm, shimmering, hovering, its black needle of a beak
quickly probing the red flowers. A cicada's scratchy metallic
call rose over the humming of the little bird. If he listened, birds
were calling everywhere. A phoebe swooped from the garage, where
every year they built a nest on the raised garage door and every year
someone shut the door and spilled the nest into a small liquid
disaster on the cement, yolks and whites and the muddy grass nest
unhinged. It was just one of those small collisions, mildly sad. The
air was moist and warm, the leaves at their most tumid thickness.
And amongst all this rich shade
and sunlight was the house, unused, empty of all visible life
except for the spiders in the high corners and their small prey. He
went out to the mailbox and brought back an armful of paper, let
himself by key into the kitchen and let the mail fall onto the
counter. A few actual letters and bills could be winnowed from the
junk, and these he took into the living room to look at, sitting on
the deep leather couch, the mail on the red coffee table in the light
of a wall of windows.
There was a letter from Phyllis
Bateman, the Cascom town clerk.
RFD#3. Cascom, N.H. 03898
Dear Luke,
We have in our shed a big wooden chest that belonged to your Uncle
Shem. It weighs about 150-200 lbs. and is locked with an old padlock
so we don't know what is inside. We can keep it as it is not in the
way at all but we thought you ought to know we have it.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Bateman
He had to be interested in what
was in that chest—probably tools, or old ledgers, he supposed.
But he did remember a big chest of rough hardwood that took up much
space beside Shem's woodburning range. He'd thought it a woodbox.
Perhaps it was full of stove wood, and Shem had decided to padlock it
for some old, old man's reason. Wood was heat, and in the long New
Hampshire winter heat could be as valuable as any thing. Shem might
even have dreamed that someone came in the night and stole his
precious fuel, sneaking in when he went to the outhouse or during the
erratic sleep of his old age. He had always been a man who believed
what he alone had reasoned out.
He read the letter again,
hearing in it disapproval, just the slightest,
taking-everything-into-consideration disapproval, of his absence from
Shem's funeral, including, maybe, his long absence from Cascom. He
had known Phyllis Bateman for many years, beginning when he was
three or four and she was in her teens, long before she married
George Bateman. Her maiden name was Follansbee. She was pretty then,
with black hair, though she was always squarish and plump. He
hadn't seen her for six years, and now she must be getting to be an
old woman. Years ago there had been a tragedy in her family—the
suicide of one of her sons—but he couldn't remember the son's
name.
He would have to go to New
Hampshire and buy Shem a stone, a ritual he did not anticipate with
pleasure, A telephone bill, overdue. He must pay for messages that
had all been unhappy.
Then a stamped envelope with no
return address, his name and address typed in an elite face that was
more immediately recognizable than he expected it to be. He
opened the envelope, thinking that maybe it wasn't the semiliterate
Avenger striking again, also thinking that he really didn't need
this, God damn it, but if this were a second message maybe this wacko
was for real after all. Again the postmark was Grand Central Annex.
Luke Carr:
How is God offended that your filth entered her Sacred Body! The Day
will come, I have promised Him!
All right, he thought. If it
were tapering off from murder toward theological niceties maybe
the whole thing would eventually go away. But what woman did this
person have in mind? Helen? Another woman? He didn't want to think
about old lusts and passions. And of all the women he could
think of, none had been any less an accomplice than he. But that case
probably wasn't arguable in the court of the Avenger's mind. A
joke—maybe this was all a joke, he tried to think, done by
somebody who didn't know what had happened. But he couldn't make that
believable. Of course it was possible that he might even know the
Avenger; one could know someone for a long time without learning what
bells gonged in the silence of the head. He had once been clearly
betrayed by a friend, which had been a shock deeper than any
historical or literary example had prepared him for.
Suddenly he realized that he was
exhausted, that he hadn't slept much last night and the only thing he
had taken into his system, and kept there, was the bourbon at the
airport. The rest of the mail looked like bills, so he left it for
later. When he got up his body was weak. "Dangerously weak,"
he said aloud in the people-less room. "Dangerously weak—did
you hear that? Do you hear me?" Who? He half staggered out to
the car and brought in his suitcase and briefcase, then fell on the
couch. His head seemed lighter as he lay back, but that symptom,
which said not to lie back, was not warning enough against the
weakness. He was like a fluid, lighter than water. He thought, at the
last, that he should lock the kitchen door.
He was awake, aware of the loss
of time, that bereavement of life that always saddened and depressed
him when he slept in daylight and awoke to find the day ending.
The southern window-wall, meant to catch the low winter sun but eaved
against the high summer sun, revealed the hay of the neglected lawn
in a twilight that seemed ancient.
He had been helpless in his
sleep—sick, unconscious and visible; he should at least
have locked the kitchen door. The inside of his mouth was sticky. He
wondered if the letter had made him this apprehensive, or if he would
ordinarily have been aware of an unlocked door in Wellesley on a
summer afternoon, a car in the garage and one in the driveway,
no mail in the mailbox. The unkempt lawn might tempt a burglar,
but that was all. He'd meant to get a neighborhood high school boy to
mow it, but had kept forgetting. Ah, these responsible little
domestic impulses. He used to like to mow the lawn, making and
remaking that finished emerald smoothness in which his family's house
was set.
The phone in the kitchen began
to ring. When he got up he started to faint, but bent over and let
the dizziness slide away.
It was Ham Jones. "Luke?
Glad to have you back, buddy! Your mind still made up?"
"I guess so," Luke
said.
"Okay! Can I bring these
people over tomorrow morning, say around ten?"
"Sure. Okay."
"Okay! See you then! No
problems! Good-bye!"
So. What that meant was that he
would go through with it. It didn't seem his proper sort of duty to
have to go through the rooms and pick out what would be saved, what
given to the Salvation Army, what thrown out. Helen was good at
that sort of thing. What would he do with things like the trophy
Johnny won swimming at Camp Ontowah? The cheap, brave,
silver-colored statuette stood on Johnny's chest of drawers
between a Sopwith Pup and a Fokker D-VII. The clothes would go to the
Salvation Army.
What about the books? There must
be a thousand books in the house—cookbooks, gardening books,
kids' books, novels, reference books, history books, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
dictionaries, scrapbooks,
notebooks, photograph albums, ledgers, bankbooks, checkbooks,
paperback books, little magazines, non-books, fashionable books,
unread books, unreadable books. And things, gadgets—TV sets,
radios, hi-fi, calculators, skis, sleds, skates, hair driers, mixers,
toys, bicycles, sprayers, shoes, paints, boots, brushes, medicines,
hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, snow-blower, mowers, clippers,
bulbs, watches, saws, clocks, musical instruments, vacuum
cleaner, plumber's helpers, brooms, mops, pots and pans and broilers,
silver and condiments and cutlery and nutcrackers; God, he had hardly
begun. Where did all those things come from? How could there be room
here for all of those things? The energy and expense that had gone
into their acquisition was stunning; and now what a shock it was
to be left alone, as if with your sins at the final reckoning, with
all this dreck that once must have seemed absolutely necessary when
the living ones were here.