Hunger and Thirst (2 page)

He tried to get up. It was all he could think of doing.

His muscles contracted, forming hard blocks, useless blocks. His eyes expanded into wide elliptic orbs as he tried to get up. A whine hung in his taut throat like a low rasping note on a violin. The clarity of the sound made his heart beat in fear. In dreams the sounds you heard were without location, out of context. You heard them in your flesh. Senses intermingled. You not only heard them, you felt and tasted and smelled them.

But this was clear, sharp sound, the sound of his own whining as he struggled to clutch together strands of ligament and pull his body to a sitting position so he could get up and wash his face.

And he couldn’t move.

Blood ran gushing through his body. He felt the rising heat. Except in his back; his back was cold and clammy. As if he were stripped to the waist, lying in wet morning grass.

Abruptly he saw himself, years before, in camp when he and another boy had gone hiking before anyone was up and walked in a big field of tall grass and clover. And took off their shirts and lay on their backs in the cool, dewy grass and watched the sky suffuse with color and laughed and shivered and felt mysterious.

He felt that body sensation now.

It was too clear to be a dream sensation.

He tried to move again. The more he felt that he was awake, the more savage grew the need to rise up and wash his face. For if all this rigidity, this inability to move were a thing of wakefulness, he could do nothing to stop terror from swallowing him. He had to immerse himself in frantic efforts to rise.

He tried to move. He fought to move. All things in the universe parted from him but the struggle to rise up.

Which he couldn’t do.

“Why?”

He muttered it. Confused and, now, sinking into fright. Why couldn’t he move? There was no reason for it. He’d come back there the night before and went to bed and…

But why was he dressed and why that cold clammy feeling in his back.

It was because of… For a moment he thought he had it. Scenes of the night before threw themselves on the screen of memory and he thought he knew.

But the recollections were thrown one on the other in too great a confusion. Images piled up on each other. He couldn’t see.

Get up! His brain cried out to the sullen, sleeping armies of his body.

But all his orders went unanswered. He was stuck fast. Like clay picked up in the hand and driven down on a sticky wooden surface. Like hardened wax, like solidified metal. Trying to get up only made his chest and stomach heave, rise and fall quickly. It only made the tortuous breaths flare out his nostrils and gush down over his lips in a hot torrent. He couldn’t move.

And struggling suddenly to clutch the belief that he was dreaming caused a maelstrom of unbidden terror to billow out from his brain and suck him in. He whimpered. He couldn’t help it. Over and over he thought—I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t under…

He tried desperately to think it out.

His body trembled and shook and every thought that tried to form in logic was shoved aside and mangled by an enlarging bolt of fear. He tried to remember, struggling to arouse a little ration from the mounting chaos of his mind. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to concentrate.

At first, nothing would come. The harder he tried, the more confused and jumbled everything grew.

Then the mists tried to clear. Jigsaw pieces tried to clutch elusive arms, lock hands to show their picture. The shop. The old man. The bee that plunged far into the reaches of his flesh. He knew these things. They flashed across his brain like pictures that a speeded camera hurled across a glossy screen.

Running. He remembered running and running. He remembered the room. He remembered throwing off the coat. He remembered the flock of bills fluttering down in blackness. He remembered falling and…

The meat cleaver across his body.

It was getting clearer.

But, suddenly, he didn’t want it to get clearer. He wanted it to cloud.

He was afraid to see anymore. He wanted desperately to believe it was a dream.

It
had to be
a dream. He kept his eyes closed and his throat drew itself in. Under his jaw bones, the arteries pulsed and he felt them pulse. In his mind a timid, frightened voice asked the questions over and over, in a terrified longing to know: How can a man not get up? How can a man not move at all? How can this be when it is only a little thing in the shoulder? Why?

Paralyzed.

The word formed before he could stop it.

It seared him mercilessly. Paralyzed. It chanted its own hideous suggestions of hopelessness to him. And the thin voice went on under it, sighing and moaning—How can a man not move? How can a man not get up when it is only a little thing in his shoulder, a thing he hardly feels at all?

He fought again to believe he was dreaming. Every cloud he saw in the room was encouraged. Every blurred outline, every unsteady object was embraced as a sign that he was still asleep. He reasoned it and struggled to convince himself with this reason.

Well, wasn’t it impossible after all? Could such a thing be? No, for listen, there in the hall someone just unlocked their door and went to the bathroom and, listen, there is the lock on the bathroom door being slid into place.

He suddenly realized that he was trying, at once, to convince himself that he was asleep and that he was awake. And the confusion of not knowing which way to turn let fear pour into the vessel of his thoughts again. He poured it back out desperately, plunging back to the only salvation he could think of.

It was a dream.

He caught at it, held tightly to it. It had to be a dream. Soon to awaken, he was enmeshed in a last flurry of nightmare. Why, that happened very often. He knew that. He reasoned it out. Sometimes, no
lots
of times, when you were dreaming, you knew you were asleep and that no matter what was happening to you, there was actually nothing to worry about. It was just a nightmare. Yes, you actually
told
yourself that right smack dab in the middle of the dream.

The monster loomed over you with its dripping fangs. The spiders started dropping all over you. You were threatened with death, dismemberment, any of the manifold horrors that an unshackled brain can envision.

And right in the very center of this hideous panic you calmly told yourself—Oh don’t worry about this, you’re dreaming, can’t you see that? Why, you’re dreaming this. You’re lying in your own bed in your own room and all this supposed horror is just an emanation from the brain. That’s all.

This situation was just like all the others. Oh, perhaps it was a little more notable for details but outside of that…

He smiled. He forced himself to smile. Let it flow, he thought. A dream is just a dream. It cannot harm me really. He let it flow and did not fight. Instead he tried to flow along with it, see it through to its inevitable conclusion when he would jolt up on the bed in sudden sweating wakefulness, stare at the wall and then, a moment later, chuckle and say—
God what an awful dream
.

So it was his room. All right. Fuzzy at the edges, of course, as in all dreams. As seen through a glass darkly. All right though, my room without a doubt. So what? No reason why one couldn’t dream of his own room. So look at it then. Enjoy this dream. Try to remember it. Then when you awake, write down every detail of it and, following Freud’s dictums, you should be able to analyze it and find out what’s bothering you as if you didn’t already…

He stopped that train of ideas because thinking of what bothered him smacked too strongly of reality and he didn’t wish to dwell on reality now.

So he looked.

At the pale green walls. Who said, he asked himself, that you don’t see colors in your dreams? Am I seeing colors or am I not seeing colors? I am seeing colors. Pale green. That’s the color of my true love’s… He looked at the thick steam pipe by the door. He looked at the yellow-brown paneled door with its porcelain knob the color of a fish’s belly. Over the door, he saw the double-paned transom, each pane black with coated dust.

Well, well, observed some irritating portion of his brain, isn’t it a remarkably realistic dream. Rather overpowering in its detail, isn’t it?

He felt his chest shudder once. Caught in the need for pretending, he went on, fighting to convince himself at last that it was a dream, knowing that he could if he only took enough time, knowing that at last he could make it so that he really
was
dreaming.

He looked at the wardrobe closet at the foot of the bed. It was black and shellacked with two round glass knobs screwed in and fancy plywood curlycues glued to the surface of the door.

Well, said that part of his brain again, if it’s a dream, why don’t you have Sally come walking in naked and jump into bed with you? You know that anything you want in a dream is yours, you know that the sky’s the limit when you’re dreaming.

He fought it off. Never mind, he told himself. It’s not clear at all. Yes it is, said the part of his mind, it’s incredible in its detail. Why look at those glass knobs and those curlycues, now come on, ‘fess up, have you ever in your life seen anything so clearly lifelike?

His eyes fled about looking for vindication of his theory. No, the corners weren’t clear, they were fuzzy like in a dream. That’s the sleep in your eyes, that’s myopia. Not so, it’s a dream I tell you, everything is fuzzy, without detail. What about that single bulb hanging down from the high, white, dusty ceiling on a chain with the dusty black wire snaking in and out among the links? It’s not as clear as that, it’s a mile away. It’s the moon. No, it’s not as clear as that, it’s a mile away. It’s the moon. No, it isn’t and what about the dresser, look at how black and chipped and clear it is. See? Only the bottom drawer is pushed in and there’s that white towel on the top and the dusty-surfaced mirror perched up on those two lathed arms. See that? No, it’s a dream! The box of soda crackers and the half-empty jar of peanut butter, look, you can even smell the peanut butter if you sniff hard.
I tell you it’s a dream!

His eyes shifted wildly, twin planets dipping in swimming milky space. It’s a dream, a dream!

And the chair with the brown hat and the bunched up brown overcoat, see the fine strands, the weave of the wool and the swirling mounds of bills and the stolid white table over against the wall with the black typewriter on it and the yellow, sleeveless sweater and…

OH, MY GOD!!

Terror struck him dumb.

His eyes plunged sight into blackness and the wind on his flesh was cold.

It was real.

He was in his room on Third Avenue in the city of New York. He was really there, lying paralyzed. It was his own body he saw on the bed, actually his own paralyzed body. To his left the old woman was in her room wheezing in the heavy slumber of the aged. To his right, the drunk was gagging on his bed, gurgling and coughing and spitting in a waste basket. All there, hard and vital and measurable, now that he could no longer delude himself.

And, outside, the city, concrete and steel and unseeing in its merciless separation, was stirring itself for another day.

The building was made of brick.

It was square, a four-floored dingy box of rooms, sagging and standing off the sidewalk like a fat old woman too tired to go on. Its face was sprinkled with dirty-paned windows and scarred with jagged, rusty scars of fire escapes. It stood on the corner hemmed in on one side by the elevated structure, on the other by a piano factory.

Its front door led into a dim hallway that smelled of lye and rot and eternal stews. The walls were spattered with all manner of long dry and unidentifiable liquids. The faded rug ran like a colorless fungus from wall to wall and, creeping up the stairs, died at the doorway to the roof.

The house stood still in the early morning.

Once, at five a.m., a laborer in hashhouse-spotted work clothes had shuffled out to catch a bus for Jersey. His slamming of the front door had bounced back into the sleepy shell.

Now it was quiet again, its tenants all tucked away neatly in their respective shells, turning lethargically on bumpy mattresses or lying in stupefied slumber.

Alone or in arms strange and familiar, they blended together into the flat batter of lost hopes that swelled and ran dead through the halls of the old grey house. On the first floor and on the second and the third.

And on the fourth…

He was lying there shivering when it struck him.

“Uh!”

His face twisted in agony as exploding heat pressed against the walls of his bladder. His stomach bubbled and contracted. Bolts of fire branded it. Oh my God! His mind cried, I have to get up! His eyes ran over the room as if seeking some sign of rescue.

Again!

A flaming mallet pounded against the nerve-sensitive lining of his body.

“No, this is im…”
Impossible!
His mind finished in a shriek as his tongue was caught up in a rushing tide of hot pain.

His eyes narrowed and almost closed. His teeth clicked together, clenching. He saw the ceiling ripple through pain-clouded eyes, watched it flow waterlike through his contorted gaze. He sucked in wincing breaths as his bladder shot blunt waves of agony through him again. The pain swept over him like a wind, like a horde of crushing hands pawing at him.

He tried to look down at his stomach to see if it was swollen as it felt. It felt like a pus-filled gourd about to explode and shower the bed and the walls with its loathsome cream of rot. His shaking gaze ran down over the heap of his body. And, in the center of pain, the thought came again, sickening in its clarity…

This is real. This is actually happening
.

Then, as the spasm passed for a moment, he cried out in his mind—Get up! You have to get up!

He fought. He panted, trying to move, his teeth grating together until he thought they would grind each other to dust. Breaths whistled through his nose and mouth. His eyes bulged out from their sockets as titanic effort screamed for the maximum from his body. His right hand trembled, his legs ached and burned. Only his upper back and shoulders were still cold and damp.