Boswell (51 page)

I got on a Broadway bus. As inconspicuously as possible I slumped in my seat. I closed my eyes; I took small, imperceptible sips of breath; I stiffened; I allowed my body to pitch, as volitionlessly as a stone, with the momentum of the bus. In a few minutes someone sat down beside me. The rustle of a newspaper indicated that my seat mate was as yet unaware of me. Once the bus stopped abruptly and I fell stiffly against my companion; then we turned a corner and I was buffeted away from him, against the window. My feet shot out in compensation and I could feel our shoes touching. I could no longer hear the rustling of the newspaper, and I knew that whoever sat next to me was studying me. I could feel the power of my corpse slowly collecting, accumulating. The temptation to open my eyes was almost irresistible. Gradually the soft, random chatter of those around me began to subside. The silence pulled out behind me like a rug unrolling. Soon the only sound was the bus itself and the noises of traffic. Now I felt the full weight of everyone’s curiosity, the contagious, rubbery-necked swoosh of their attention, their startled, disturbed dread. They were like creatures arrested by some unaccustomed noise in a forest. I felt my death ooze out to them; I felt their almost adrenal response. It was as if some powerful taboo had been violated. I ached to stare back at them.

When the bus swung around another corner I collapsed ruthlessly against the person next to me. He gasped and recoiled as if struck by something profoundly unclean.

Someone rushed up. “Is he all right?” a voice said.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell,” said the man next to me, shoved now into a kind of action. He leaned forward and shook me cautiously.

I looked up at once. “What is it?” I said, a little angrily.

“I thought…” he stumbled. “We thought something was wrong. That you were sick. Dead.”

“I must have fallen asleep,” I said. “Is it Fourteenth Street yet?”

“Blocks back,” said the man who had come up the aisle.

The bus stopped and I got up quickly.

“Excuse me,” the man next to me said as I moved past him, “but you sleep like a dead man.”

“Excuse
me,”
I said, “but I need the practice.”

I went up on the roof of a ten-story building and climbed onto the ledge.

A crowd gathered and someone below ran off to get the police. I was too high to see their expressions, but I can imagine that they were seeing me as if I had been an ominous sky they scanned for warnings of a storm.

As I waved once and screamed and jumped backwards out of sight onto the tar and gravel rooftop, I could sense their shocked, massed inward suck of air. Never mind what you read about crowds at a motor race or a prizefight; people do not want people to die.

I took an elevator back down to the ground floor and went out into the streets to join the crowd.

“What’s happened?” I asked someone.

“Some guy was trying to kill himself. He fell backwards and probably knocked himself out. A cop’s gone up to get him.”

“They’ll put
him
away,” I said. “Suicide’s a serious crime.”

I went down into a subway station and boarded a train for the first time in my life. My hands cautiously in my lap, I sat on the wide wicker seat that ran along the length of the carriage and rode out to somewhere in Brooklyn. I got off the train, crossed the platform and got on another train going back. I sat next to a young girl about thirteen years old. She carried one of those little brass and plastic suitcases kids pack their leotards and ballet slippers in when they’re going for a lesson, and she was reading
Mademoiselle.
As the train tunneled under the river I pitched forward suddenly and groaned. I grabbed my chest and rocked it, frantic as a mother with a dead infant. I leaned heavily against the child. “Today’s the day,” I gasped, “a man died in your arms on the subway.”

On Fifth Avenue I saw a very well-dressed man carrying an expensive briefcase.

“Please,” I said, rushing up to him, “I’ve just swallowed cyanide. I was trying to kill myself but I’ve changed my mind.”

“Oh, my God,” the man said. “Oh, Jesus. Quick, let’s get a cab. Taxi,” he called. “Taxi! Here, take my arm. Taxi. God damn it,
taxi.
How much did you take? Where’s a hospital? The driver would know. Taxi!
Taxi!”
He waved his briefcase like a leather flag. “TAXI!” he screamed.

“In New York there must be fifty thousand cabs,” I said, “but do you think you can get one when you really need it?” I pulled away from him and disappeared around a corner.

I went up to the Bronx and walked around until I came to a park. I was wearing good clothes—I didn’t want anyone to think I was a bum sleeping one off. I found a deserted gravel path and stretched myself out face down across it. Soon I heard someone coming up the walk; from the squeaky crunchy sounds it must have been either a housemaid pushing a perambulator or a kid on a tricycle. Then I heard someone cooing as if to a child, and I knew that it was a housemaid. She didn’t see me until she was almost on top of me; then she screamed. I thought she would run away, but she came up to me and turned me over.

“Mister,” she called. “Mister. Please. Oh,” she yelled, turning away from me, “there’s been a murder. Help! Help!” Leaving the baby carriage, she ran off to get help.

When I could no longer hear her cries I rose, brushed myself off and walked away.

I was sitting in a cafeteria on Seventh Avenue when a woman came in leading an old man. She brought him to a table next to mine, pulled the chair out for him, and took his hand and guided it carefully to its wooden back. “It’s just behind you,” she said very softly.

The old man lowered himself tenderly into the seat as if he were tentatively sitting down in a tub of hot water. He might have been an old man at the beach, with his back to the waves, sitting in the sea.

The woman leaned over him. “What do you feel like having, Papa?” she asked gently.

“I think an egg salad sandwich,” he said. “Tomato soup. Do they have pie? Pie. Coffee.”

“I’ll bring it right back for you,” she said.

When she left him to go through the line, the blind man pulled himself closer to the table with great care. He put his hands out experimentally, feeling for the salt, the pepper, the bottles of ketchup and mustard and sugar. He frowned as if he might have forgotten to tell the woman something, and then sighed resignedly. I had the impression that his blindness was fairly recent. He took off his hat and set it down too close to the edge of the table. In one of his clumsy motions of orientation he brushed it off and it fell to the floor. ,

The woman came back with the food and set it down in front of him. She picked up the hat and put it back on the table without saying anything. “Do you think you’ll be all right?” she asked as she hovered over him. “I have to see Sybil before she leaves the office.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “What am I, an old blind man?”

She put a tablespoon in his hand and moved the soup in front of him. “I won’t be long,” she said. “Her office is in this block.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“Well then, twenty minutes.” She took a cigar out of her purse and put it in his breast pocket. “There’s a cigar for you when you’re through.”

When she had been gone for about five minutes I looked hastily around the cafeteria. We were almost alone. I waited for another minute and then leaned toward the old man and slammed a chair down violently. The blind man was startled and turned his head uselessly toward the sound. I bent down quickly beside him at a level with his stomach and grunted twice. I stamped my heels clumsily on the tile floor.

“Is anything wrong?” the old man asked. “Is anything wrong? Ruth?” A little tomato soup had spilled from the spoon in his shaking hand onto his vest.

I drew back soundlessly as the old man called again. When there was no answer he shook his head and scowled in frustration. He pushed the soup away from him, splashing some onto his sandwich, where it soaked into the bread like blood. He fumbled for the sandwich, found it, and pulled it without appetite toward his mouth. I waited until he had finished half of it and then rose from my seat quietly and went around behind his chair. “I’m a detective,” I said.

“My credentials.”

“What is it?” he asked nervously.

“It’s none of my business, of course, but I don’t see how you can just go on eating. Well, maybe you’re used to it. Fourteen years on the force and I’m not.” I turned away for a moment and lowered my voice. “Better call the morgue, Harry. This is their baby.”

“What is it?” the old man said again.

“I’ll have to ask you a few questions,” I said. “You’re our only witness.”
“What is it?”

“Did it seem to you that the deceased acted peculiar in any way? I mean, did the deceased do anything that may have looked funny to you?”

“Is someone dead?” he asked, frightened. “I don’t see,” he said. “I heard a noise. What was it?”

“You’re blind?”

“Yes. Yes. Who is it? Is it a woman?”

I hesitated. “No,” I said finally. “A man. About thirty-three, thirty-four. A big fellow, strongly built.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” the old man said. “That’s terrible.”

“That his wallet, Harry? Yeah, give it to me. Let’s see who he was.”

“That’s terrible,” the old man said softly. He realized suddenly that he was still holding his sandwich, and he dropped it as though it were something foul.

“Boswell,” I said. “His name was James Boswell.”

“Oh, what a terrible thing,” the man said. “A young man. That’s a very awful thing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He said my name to himself over and over again, as though he were trying to imagine from the sound of it what its owner could have been like.

“Well—” I said.

“It was kind of you to try to do something for him,” the old man said.

“That’s my job.”

“Is he from here?” he asked.

“What?”

“Is he from this city?”

“No,” I said harshly. “He’s from out of town. From somewhere else. He’s a foreigner.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” the old man said. “Maybe he was on holiday. On business.”

“A tourist,” I said.

“Poor man,” he said. “I wish I had had my sight. Maybe he gave a signal… I might have helped.”

“No,” I said. “Nobody could have done anything.”

Oh, what a thing it is to be settled by our past—to be no better, finally, than our toilet training, than domestic arrangements we don’t even understand at the time. The symptoms for the day are a virulent disgust, advanced abhorrence, endemic loathing, mortal detestation, inoperable repugnance.

He died such a healthy fella, and everybody—
everybody
—was very kind.

VII

At first the doorman did not recognize me. He moved with a faint threatening motion to block my way and slipped his whistle out of his breast pocket.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “I live here.” The doorman stared. “Oh, excuse me, sir,” he said at last. “I didn’t know you. Your clothes… Are you feeling all right sir?”

“I’m sick. I’m having a little trouble with my breathing. With my heart. All my glands are oozing.” “I’ll help you up to your apartment,” he said. “No.” The whistle was still in his hand. “Just pipe me aboard,” I said. The doorman held the door for me and I moved through it almost drunkenly. A woman coming out as I entered looked at me curiously.

“We’re taking over,” I said. “The neighborhood’s changing.” I backed into the elevator giggling.

For a moment I couldn’t remember my floor. I pressed the button and felt the elevator lift me by pushing at my shoes and had an impression, brief but terrifying, that it would move me upwards through the roof, the clouds, space, past the stars.

I stumbled out at my floor, but when I felt in my pockets for the key I did not have it. I could not remember now if I had ever had a key to the apartment. When I rang the bell the chimes inside (Gift-of-the-Month Club) sounded a fragment from some hymn. There were no other sounds. I pressed the bell again; I knocked on the door. It hurt my fists to tap even lightly upon it and I stopped a man walking down the hall toward the elevator.

“Excuse me, neighbor, but I am neurasthenic and it is acute agony for me to rap upon this door. I wonder if you would do it for me.”

“Why don’t you ring the bell?”

“I have, sir. No one comes.”

“Then it won’t do you any good to knock on the door, will it?” the man said, and continued down the hall.

I looked helplessly at the door and taking the knob in my hands began to shake it. “Open up,” I yelled. “Make my bed soon, Mother, for I am sick to the heart and fain would lie down.”

I moved on to the next apartment and pressed the buzzer. A woman I did not recognize opened the door almost immediately. I had not shaved for several days and now, a huge reprobate presence in old clothes, I stood leaning clumsily against her doorway. She gasped and tried to shut the door.

“Just a minute.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The lady of the house is not at home.”

I put my arm on the closing door and pushed against it with all my remaining strength. “All right,” I said, shoving a finger into my pocket and pointing it as her as if it were a gun, “this is a stickup.”

The woman stepped back, “What do you want?”

“Is that the kitchen?” I asked in a low voice, jerking my head around to the right.

“Yes,” she answered weakly.

“Then you better gimme—gimme—gimme a glass of milk!” I laughed. “No. I live next door. I forgot my key and no one’s home. I’m sick. Get the doorman. He’s got a passkey. Call him, lady—please.”

She didn’t move.

“I’m James Boswell,” I said. “From next door. I’m in the book. Look, in time to come we’ll laugh about this. See, it was just my finger. I fooled you.” I saw the speaking tube on the wall just inside the door. “May I?” I asked, already pressing the button. I put my lips next to the mouthpiece, receiving it as I would a kiss. “Who’s there? Who’s there? Operator! Operator!”

“You’ve got your finger on the button,” the woman said.

I took it away and a voice, tinny as the sound of a ventriloquist’s dummy, came out of the small speaker. “Yes?”