Hunger and Thirst (12 page)

Close your eyes Darkness sweep black over the city Robe the day with night Muffle the cars and the bedlam of the strains Strike the busses dead Let heavy silence hang like a mist Let silence and peace fall like a curtain at the end of this my lay Let me sleep in peace and when I wake up Oh God let me rise and depart and I’ll never bother you again I’ll be good if you’ll just do this for me I swear it by my soul if soul I have Just let me sleep oh please let me sleep The ceilings are black velvet the walls are black velvet the screen is black velvet except for one word in white the word is Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleepsleep sleepsleepsleep…

Brain slowing down. Descent. Into the pit of unconsciousness
.

The church bells were chiming six as he woke up.

He only heard four of them. But it couldn’t be four o’clock, he thought. It was getting dark. It’s April and it doesn’t get dark until later in April. He guessed it was six o’clock. There was more noise at five o’clock with people running up the steps to the elevated platform and cars and buses rushing through traffic and the elevated trains running more often. And it would be dark if it were seven.

So it was six.

He felt a slight yet definite satisfaction in knowing what time it was. It got him more or less back in tune. He was part of the world again. He had caught up with the schedule and now he could get up, put on his coat and walk back into the world again.

He lay very still. He didn’t try to get up. He was wondering with a twinge of fear whether he should wait; a little while anyway. Let reserves build themselves up, let the muscle tone rejuvenate. Then he could get up. It would probably be much better to wait a little while longer. Maybe until seven o’clock. When it was too dark to see anything but the hall light through the dust-thick transom. Then he’d get up. His throat moved nervously as his mind ranted—Oh stop the crap will you? You’re not going to get up and you know it.

I am!
He fired back in anger.

After a little more rest. Then he’d get up.

He turned his head as if turning away from his insulting mind. He looked at the rose. The petals were more loose now, hanging like blushing lettuce leaves in sloppy folds around the still tight heart. Dying from the outside in, he thought. How different from man. Our heart stops and then we unfold from the inside out. It is better to die that way because…

He drove his lips together furiously.

Stop this idiotic prattle about dying! he ordered his mind. What in the hell’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? Don’t you know that there’s nothing so desperate in the world except that thinking makes it so. Get some perspective boy, get some… it all sounded so ridiculous to him that he shoved the entire series of thoughts over the cliff of attention.

He looked at the water in the glass and his drying tongue ran over his lips. His throat was parched. The air was so lacking in moisture in the room. It was dusty air.

He kept staring at the bubbles rise and licking his lips. One, two, three, four, five… oh, for Christ’s sake stop going so fast. Then—Oh, for Christ’s sake stop trying to count them.

But he couldn’t help feeling a growing disquiet for every bubble that disappeared. It was water evaporating and gone, sucked into the great rotting maw of the room. There was that much less water to drink. And it seemed that each drop was a symbol of part of his existence.

Evaporating slowly, ceaselessly
…

He shut his eyes, blotting out the sight and the train of thought. So what? he thought in studied belligerence, what in the hell difference does it make? I’ll get all the water I want when I get up. All I want. Cool torrents of it. Glasses of it, bottles of it pouring cold and wet down my dry throat. Rivers of it to plunge in, lakes of it to float in, oceans of water to drink and drink and…

He cut that short too, trembling a little, frightened at the insistence with which the stream of water associations had torn through his brain as though they had a vitality all their own; like a rampaging animal, unstoppable. That’s bad, he thought, don’t start rhapsodizing about water and food for Christ’s sake. That’s the fastest way to the… never mind!

Just watch it.

He smiled. He forced his lips to raise in token of his calculated amusement.

Why get so upset? What’s the difference? Why am I making so much of it? I’ll be up and around in no time. There, listen to the bells, the loud alarm… never mind.

Six fifteen already. Only forty five minutes and I’ll be up and… it seemed obviously forced to him. To say that in forty five minutes he’d get up. If he could get up in forty five minutes why not get up immediately? Muscles didn’t rejuvenate by the clock, they didn’t knit by stopwatch.

But he had to hold on to that belief. He had to keep stalling it. And convince himself that he wasn’t stalling but was actually doing the only thing possible, the sensible thing. Sure. Me and my overcoat and my hat and the money. And I’ll, oh, I won’t forget the money, never fear. I’ll be—California here I come. He found himself humming it, straining to be composed and easy.

The inside of his throat felt as if it were rattling as he hummed. A lump moved up into his throat. He had to cut short the humming and gulp down the lump. He began again. The lump came again. Oh, this is silly, he thought, this goddamn humming. What’s the matter with me, am I off the trolley tracks humming goddamn songs to myself?

He stopped and swallowed the lump. It felt like a different lump. He wondered if it was the same one. It might be a different one, suggested his other mind, weary of being serious. No, it must be the same one, he argued seriously, what the hell have I got, a lump factory in my throat?

Of course it was the same one. He swallowed it. It came back. He swallowed it again. It popped up again.

He kept swallowing until it stayed down. Eight times he had to do it before it stayed down. It made him shiver at its mute ridiculous insistence.

I wonder if, just for now, he thought, I can reach out and get hold of the glass and get myself a sip of water. Oh, I realize full well that it’s stale water but that makes very little difference under the circumstances, that is really immaterial to me, really I don’t mind so what do you say now, may I have a little sip of water just a tiny little…

A croaking sob of rage puffed out his cracked lips.

God damn it!
Stop this puerile, idiotic monologue up there!

He forced his mind to blank itself as well as it could. He concentrated on darkness. He made himself think of the time he’d gone to a lecture on hypnotism at college and had gone up on the stage at the request of the lecturer to see if he could be put under hypnosis.

The man had said that it would be as refreshing as a good night’s sleep. And Erick was exhausted. So he went up there.

It didn’t work.

His mind was trying. He did exactly what the man said but nothing happened. He never even came close to being hypnotized. He thought maybe he could do it now.

Yes! The idea suddenly occurred to him. He saw Jose Ferrer in a movie do it. Ferrer hypnotized himself to walk after a major operation. Maybe he could do the same thing.

Remembering what the hypnotist had said he told himself that he was in a strange theatre whose walls were all black velvet, whose ceilings were black velvet, whose every seat and whose rugs were black velvet, whose curtain was black velvet…

Velvet.

Watches hanging head down in the pawn shop. Silent, unticking watches. Lost men. The shop and the robbery. He saw himself there again shouting and yelling at the old man, calling him vile names, striking his old dry face. He felt the sensation of his bunched fist striking the hard bony cheek. He felt the bullet digging into him.

He was paralyzed. He couldn’t move. God, isn’t there another road, he thought. Doesn’t any path of thought lead away from this room? Why does every train of…

“I can’t wait.”

His cracked, dried up voice announced sudden intention. He couldn’t wait like a lump of mushroom on a rotting log.

He tried to clench his right hand and almost cried out in joy.

It closed easily!

He flexed it suddenly, opening and closing it rapidly, thinking that it was the most beautiful muscle action he had ever felt or seen in his entire life. He did it again and again until he began to realize that he was almost in the same mental condition that before required him to wait forty-five minutes before trying to get up. He was flexing the hand just to stall, to put off the inevitable moment when he must attempt to move the rest of his body.

He shut his right fist abruptly at the realization. And kept it shut.

He tried to lift his arms.

His lips drew back in a rasping inhalation of breath as he struggled. Violent heart beats began throbbing in his ears. It felt as though the opening to his eardrums were expanding and contracting sharply, almost fluttering like window shades in a gale. The beating seemed to shake his skull and, slowly, his head began to ache. It began to feel hot and swollen. But he couldn’t, he
wouldn’t
stop trying. A feeling of now or never beset him and he was sure that if he slipped back now he would be lost forever.

He tried to move his right leg, his left. An unwanted chant began to fill his brain as he fought to move.
Mountain coat and piles of money, plaster cracked and ceiling cobwebbed help me up up UP! Mountain coat and piles of
…

The church bells chimed once for the half hour but he hardly heard them.

“Come on!”

For the two words and no more, his voice rang clear.

In the next room the drunk stopped moving and held off his coughing. Erick felt an even more desperate need to rise now. It was as if retribution for his crime were in the person of the drunk in the next room and now he had heard him. And the drunk was going to investigate and have Erick punished.

His eyes bulged with the effort to move. He poured every last ounce of energy through his embattled system. His legs vibrated on the bed and his arms shuddered like bridges of flesh in a hurricane wind. His entire body twitched once.

!GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!

Too much.

Too much.

He felt himself falling backward again, down, down, like the night before. He tried to cry out but his breath was gone. He felt as though he was suffocating, being smothered to death beneath some great fluffy invisible pillow.

He landed.

And lay there, chest heaving with breaths, his body covered with perspiration. Every joint felt hot and swollen up to twice its normal size. Every inch of his body felt expanded or contracted. He felt as though his body were a land of feudal states raging at war with each other. Tendons were enflamed, muscles were spread with liquid fire, every nerve pulsed as though they were exposed to air and some fiend was driving white hot needles into their most tender spots.

His head began to roll on the pillow from side to side. He was in such pain he didn’t even notice it. He only noted without comprehending, the added cramps and pains in his neck, the new flush of dry heat that flooded over him. He was in flames, chained down, set on fire, charring to a hideous black.

He closed his eyes and gasped for a breath of cooling air.

But the air was hot, too. It scorched his throat. He kept gasping and coughing and trying to clear his throat. Somewhere in his mind, the stranger, alien to his feelings, observed that he sounded more like the drunk in the next room than the drunk did himself.

Long moments passed.

And slowly, as though reluctant to depart, the flaring pain subsided, unable to maintain its fiery, agonizing peak.

A slow shifting ache took its place, running over his limbs and torso like a heavy bed of lava tearing up chunks of nerves as it moved.

Through pain-dimmed eyes he saw the darkness creeping on the walls.

Oh God, the night is coming, he thought in terror. It’s bad enough in the day but—

Night
.

Black and cold and full of grating, screeching, howling noises. He was suddenly afraid of the dark again as he had been almost to his eighteenth year, almost to the time he went in the army. He feared its creeping ebony, he wanted it to stay daylight. Stop the sun! his mind exploded out in a fevered burst.

“Joshua!”

His voice was bubbly and feeble again. It ran from his mouth like the strangle of a drowning man. The night, the night, stalking, hanging over him, its cruel dark mantle on his face.

He sobbed, “I’m going to die.”

He said it in a phlegm thickened voice, full of self pity and horror.

He was sure of it. Sure that death would come pouncing out of the night and grab him and wrap him in its black paper and carry him away. I’m going to die in the night, he thought, alone and helpless.

He almost insisted on it now with the sudden reversal of all desire that had been a keynote of his life. The sudden petulant overthrowing of all resistance and the childish insistence that he was lost and knew it and would not raise a finger to fight it anymore. Would, on the contrary, rush to meet his doom screaming—What’s the use anyway? I can’t do anything. Come on, get it over with, damn you! A raging self-destruction, a monumental cutting off of the nose to spite the face. An acceptance of defeat rather than the expending of effort to lose stubbornness and continue the fight.

That’s what he felt like then. Suddenly he wanted death. He didn’t care. He didn’t really think of what it meant. He didn’t know what death was. But he thought it was inevitable and he was jumping to embrace it, to get it over with and show it he didn’t care one damn bit for it.

He lay there for a long time, sobbing and not caring what happened to him. His right hand clutching the blue striped bed cover at his side.

It was only later that the feeling of utter depression and loss finally departed and he began to think of Leo.

He began to hope that she would come to see him. She only lived two blocks away. She should come. She’d want to keep an eye on him surely. The way he felt it wouldn’t matter if she caught him now. Much good he’d be to her anyway, she’d probably bow out when she saw him paralyzed. But at least she’d get help and wouldn’t steal the…