Hunger and Thirst (21 page)

The paper rattles around his twitching nose as he licks the spots away. Now there is only paper. He feels almost as empty as he did when he started.

But, at least, it is a little better.

He takes the glass and sips.

Unexpectedly, he discovers a bonus chunk of nut crouching behind a wisdom tooth, flushed out by the searching water.

Joyously, he sucks it, chews it, swallows it.

It is done.

He lies still and is almost happy. Gently, reverently, he puts the wrapper on the bed beside him.

And pats it lovingly like a father patting the tiny head of his only begotten son.

Now sleep, he told himself. He felt drowsy and comfortable. He had drunk. He had eaten. He could move his arm. And there was hope for returning to life. Everything had changed. The sun shone and the bleak despair of the night before was only memory.

He’d rest and then, later, he’d force himself up and leave the room.

Forever.

Wake me at nine, he told his mind. I’m going to take a snooze. He sighed in bliss, in utmost satisfaction. Odd, he thought, how little satisfies, how the littlest things in the world are of such immense satisfaction.

He closed his eyes. He sucked down collecting saliva.

It was good to be alive.

He woke up at nine. On the dot. The church bells were ringing for the ninth time as his eyes flew open and he stared at the ceiling.

He turned his head and looked at the glass.

It was true then. He hadn’t dreamed it. Only a few drops of water were left. And the dry, curling rose lay by the side of the glass. It’ll die fast now, he thought.

He looked over on his left side and saw the candy wrapper. That was true then too. He had eaten. He had drunk. But where did it all go? He was thirsty and hungry again.

He looked back at the table.

What was the third thing? He wondered it suddenly. It was a fascinating problem. Now that he could reach out and touch it. What could it be? Odd that in his own room, he should not know what one of three objects should be.

He reached out his right arm. His hand dropped on the object. He felt coolness, smoothness. His nails raised it lever-like. His fingers slid under. He lifted it up, carried it over and looked …

At himself.

His mouth fell open. It was a shock, it made him gape. It couldn’t be him.

But it was.

His cheeks and chin and neck and the space between his nose and mouth were covered with heavy bristle.

He held the mirror closer. He could see each individual bristle. Some of them were double, two growing out of one pore. He started to count the whiskers under his nose. He lost count quickly. They weren’t arranged in rows or in any orderly fashion.

He tightened his lower jaw and thrust his chin forward. Hundreds, thousands of bristles moved out at him, starting blonde, then becoming black at the jaw line and down his neck. They looked like porcupine bristles, like black needles poking into his flesh.

He wondered what the point of it all was? Why whiskers? The age-old question cropped into his mind. Why are the useless things retained? Like wisdom teeth and appendixes and tonsils and whiskers? Or maybe they were useful and it was only men who could not assize the function.

He pushed back his chin and the hanging flesh under his chin bunched out and made his face look as if it were made in layers.

He looked at his lips.

They were well-shaped. His mouth was small. It looked like an elongated heart split across, the long way. It had hardly any color at all. The upper lip was a sickly pink. It looked puffy. There were tiny white spots on it. When he extended his mouth, the lip was shot through with thin red vertical lines. The more he did it, the more wrinkled his lip became when he relaxed it and it returned to normal size. It looked as though it had once been slashed with tiny razor blades. The lip was dry. He ran his tongue over it and the lines disappeared, the lip was as before.

The lower lip hung like a fleshy ledge over his round chin.

There was a little hollow cave between the hanging lip and his chin. The lower lip had the same coloring as the upper one. It was a little thinner though. It had the same vertical red lines. The skin on it looked old and dry. He licked it but the red lines were still there. He looked closer. There were horizontal lines too. In places, the lip looked like fleshy graph paper. Like a pale pink and minute tic-tac-toe board. He lost himself in the pattern.

He looked at the lips together.

It was a good mouth, straight, well-shaped, if you didn’t look too closely. He pressed his lower lip against the teeth. The hollow disappeared and he saw the line of tiny blackheads along the under edge of the lip. He tightened the upper lip. There were blackheads along its upper edge.

He looked into the dry, hair-networked cavities of his nostrils.

He drew back his lips and looked at his teeth.

They were yellow.

There were two big ones in the top gum on each side of the center. They looked the same, the two of them; like yellowish-white hatchet blades, the sides almost parallel. Then, on each side of them, smaller teeth. Then, two ugly ones that looked like fangs or like lopsided, unpopped grains of yellow popcorn.

Small teeth on the bottom front. Two of them that came to points like tiny enamel mountain peaks.

He opened his mouth wide and saw all the dull silver fillings. What’s the matter with teeth? he thought. What’s wrong with them that they should be so full of stopped-up holes. What was wrong with the food of the world that it ate away the teeth and made necessary toothpaste and brushes and floss and dentists?

Dentists.

He looked through the years and saw the host of dental appointments he had kept, the hours and days he had sat in the torture chair dreading the moment when the dentist would step on the pedal and the buzzing drill would start and he would press the bit against the enamel and would grind away part of Erick’s tooth. And the heat would rise and his expanding tooth would fire lances of red-hot pain into his brain.

All that work. All that money. For what?

He stuck out his tongue.

It was dryish. He looked at all the tiny white buds standing up like white plants. His tongue was covered with them. Between them he saw the reddish flesh of the tongue. In back it was whiter, more heavily coated. He saw the dark cave of his throat, the flapping red finger of red-veined flesh that hung down from the roof of his throat.

He shut his mouth.

All that in there, he thought. All those tiny buds and those rows of teeth, all different shapes, fitting into one another like the pieces of some inordinately complex jigsaw puzzle. And the tongue fitting into the space between the teeth as though it were a ship in berth. The teeth all poking out from the gums and yet the two parabolas of them meeting squarely.

It was phenomenal.

He felt something of awe for a moment. Lost in the varied magic of a face.

He looked at his nose.

Even, he thought, I
am
even. If you drew a line down the middle of me I would be cut in half, half in quantity on each side. One foot, one leg, one arm, one nostril, one eye and ear—all half. It was absolutely mathematical. What about the heart? interrupted his alien mind. He ignored it. The point was made.

The bridge of his nose was straight. The flesh ran around it smoothly and tapered out evenly to the cheeks and eyes. The two large nostrils flared back and out forming a dip of flesh on each side. The nostril cavities were shaped like falling raindrops. They ran out and then into the tip of his nose, forming a perfect sine wave upside down.

He looked close at the tiny pores in his nose.

They were clogged with dirt and grease.
She thought her face was clean until she took the tissue test!
The words offended his mind. He could take the fingernail test on his skin and get dirt, he thought.

He was strangely affected by the symmetry of his face. Strange, he thought, a man never thought how wondrous was the construction of the body. What was the matter with men?

His ears.

They
were
like shells; the poets knew what they were talking about after all. They were pink shells, the bony structures exactly the same on each side. All right, not exactly, he thought in deference to semantic principle. But close enough to make a generalization about it. And through those shells he heard the riot of the city’s street outside.

His eyes.

They shifted onto themselves.

They were most important. The eyes always were. They gave away the secrets, showed fear, indicated hope or love or hate. The face was a barometer sometimes. But the eyes always for him who could see it.

There were two puffy lids on the top and bottom of his eyes. The lashes grew out and up, out and down. They met at the comers of the eyes to brush together.

The eyeballs themselves were sunken in pits of darkened skin. The darkened skin was dotted with what looked like dozens of tiny, various-sized blisters.

There was yellowish crusted matter on the inside edges of his eyes. And from the red milky interior, wavering lines of red moved out into the whites like scarlet threads glued erratically to the curved surface.

The pupils looked like feather fans spread all the way around into a circle, running back into themselves.

The feathers were dark green at first sight. Moving inward however, he noticed that they grew lighter and lighter until, surrounding the jet black pupil, they became a delicate yellow-brown. The color of the door panels, he thought.

And the entire, ruffled iris fan was mottled with specks of brown and tiny ellipses of green surrounded by yellow.

He stared into his own eyes until they weren’t eyes anymore but strange, marvelously hued circles of color. Vaguely, he wondered again if he could be like Jose Ferrer in the picture and hypnotize himself into getting up.

Not yet, he told himself, a little while longer. He went back to his face. It was easy to get lost in the examination of it.

He looked at his eyebrows.

They were thickly haired, dark blonde. The hairs were short near the middle of his lower forehead. But they got longer as they ran over the eyes and thinned out into the temples.

There were three lines in his forehead.

They wandered through the pale, porous flesh. When he made his brow taut, he could see that along the lines were rows of closely packed, tiny blackheads. And when he raised his eyebrows, the flesh bunched up into curving ridges and more lines sprang into existence.

His hair stood up like a tangled blonde bush.

The hairs were long and bunched together. They curled up and ran wild over the side of his head and over his ears. There were specks of dandruff showing through the thick mass of strands. They clung to the scalp like snowflakes on a rock.

He held the mirror back and looked at his entire face from crown to chin.

All that incredible effort, he thought, that Herculean task of assortment and composition coming to this—
a face
.

And an ugly one.

It was grimy and bearded and sallow.

But even so it was an incredible piece of work.

And, as he put the mirror back on the table, he thought, that was only the outside.

He thought of the inside, of the fantastic tapestries of nerves and veins and capillaries. Of the endless skeins of intestine and tendon and muscle and ligament, the tissue, the glands, the entire, appalling complexity of it.

Who could design such a thing?

The question came naturally.

For a moment it made him shiver. It almost thrilled him to wonder of it. For the first time in many years he wondered if there might be guiding hand, a force.

With strange wonder in him, without fright, he closed his eyes and wondered if maybe there was a God after all.

He dreamed about a banquet.

He ate chicken and potatoes and corn and peas and cake and pie and ice cream and he drank a gallon of water and a gallon of milk and a gallon of soda.
Ooof!
—he said in the dream, I can’t eat or drink one more single thing!

He thought to himself—I must look like a man in a coffin.

He almost cried out in horror when he saw his father lying in his coffin like some hideous painted doll.

The face he knew was pasty and lifeless. He could hardly bear to look. When his aunt asked him if he wasn’t going to kiss his father goodbye, Erick was struck with terror and couldn’t move or reply. He could never have put his lips to that cold, dry skin. His mother drew him away from the coffin gently and led him out.

He hated the funeral.

It was dismal and morbid. Some thin old man from their church performed a sort of ritual over his father. Erick sat there and felt the hair rising on his scalp. He thought his father was listening. He thought any moment his father would sit up and tell them all to go home and leave him in peace.

He was disgusted with the meaningless chatter that relatives used at funerals when they hadn’t seen each other for years. Asinine prattle about how so and so had grown and how terrible a blow this was to them and how natural
he
looked.

God! Always how natural he looks. He had thought that was a joke, a cliché. But apparently the overuse which had made it a cliché still functioned actively.

Natural. Whispers of his father’s last painful moments, his contorted face and sweat of agony all resolved now into gentle, everlasting lines.

He hated all that.

When it was all over they went back into the sunlight. To Erick it was like coming back from the dead. Back to the harping world, the clang of trolley cars, the sound of heels on the sidewalk, the breaths of a living planet. He left his father behind. Soon his father would be in darkness and they would throw dirt over his face.

His mother went to the burial. He went home with his sister. When they reached Grace’s car, he put a handkerchief on the seat for his aunt.
He
was always a gentleman was what she said. In tones indicating that he was nothing else.