Hunger and Thirst (27 page)

They went fast. Ten books, twenty, twenty-five, thirty of them.

And, one morning, he woke up and saw that his book shelves were empty.

He got up and walked slowly over to the shelves, feeling a terrible rising of anguish in himself. Then, without control, he slumped to the floor and ran his hands over the dusty shelves. He tried to remember where each book had been but he couldn’t and the walls shivered through the jelly lenses of his tears.

That afternoon he sold the book shelves.

Because they remind me that my books are gone, he told himself. Because you want money, said his other mind. Regardless, it was easy for him to carry the shelves through the streets. He had acclimated himself to selling things. He brought them to book stores, to second-hand stores, to pawn shops, without the slightest sense of embarrassment now. He dumped them unceremoniously on the counter and waited in stolid silence for a price to be named. And, even, he got to the point where he could haggle and argue the price up thirty or forty cents.

And, in that way, went his suits and his raincoat and shoes and all the jewelry but his watch and his school ring. Then he even managed to sell his school ring at another shop. Once, when the check for his only story sale came, he took the ring out of hock and wore it all day and night, looking at it, holding it proudly before his eyes as a clear symbol of his return to affluence. From then on things would be different.

The ring went back into hock after three weeks.

Months passed. And, slowly, piece by piece, the familiar things left his room and it grew more and more strange and alien and less and less a place to be lived in. Why don’t you wear your black pin-stripe, Leo would ask. No, I don’t like that suit, it’s funereal, he would answer and want to kick himself for not flaunting the truth, saying—Oh, I hocked the damn thing, you know us starving writers. Ha Ha.

Ha. Ha.

He kept the radio until last.

He couldn’t bear the thought of selling it. When the idea occurred to him first he shuddered and wouldn’t even consider it. The money he’d get for it would never be equal to the pleasure it gave him. He was sure of that. The radio meant so much to him. It filled the hours. If it were taken from him, it would create a horrible, unfillable vacuum in his life.

Every morning when he woke up, he’d turn it on.

And listen to the Sunrise Symphony on station WNYC. He’d lie in bed and look drowsily at the ceiling or half slumber. And listen to the music, letting it seep into his brain like a gentle, early morning tonic.

At eight o’clock he’d turn to station WQXR and listen to the Breakfast Symphony. He’d be almost awake then. His eyes would stay open. The music would flow into him and give him the needed desire to rise and work.

Then, at nine, he’d get up, have some crackers and peanut butter and a glass of water and sit down to write. And, while he wrote, music from WNYC’s Masterwork Hour would help him along. It meant so much that he’d even taken to writing his stories in long hand so the clatter of the typewriter wouldn’t drown out the music.

And music filled his days and padded them and increased their brightness more than anything else could do. It came to him in the drabness of his Third Avenue room and carried him away. It brought a lovelier life and a lovelier world to his ears. He’d never loved and needed music more in his life than he loved and needed it then. It gained more and more importance to him. All consolations failed, they died quickly. But music sustained him, it went on and on, powerful and curative, making him happy when in silence he might have despaired, might have dreamed even more violent thoughts.

How many nights did he lie in the darkness and listen to the beautiful music that all the great minds of centuries had written for him? How many hundreds, thousands of hours did it comfort and uplift him, bearing him easily away on its soaring shoulders? He couldn’t answer.

He sold the radio.

He had to sell it. That’s what he told himself. I
have
to sell it. What am I supposed to do? Live on music and, finally, eat the radio, tube by tube, wires and all? And, trying to coat his unhappiness with this shade of glib humor, he walked the streets carrying the radio like a child to its doom. It was simple mathematics. Of course. It had to be sold.

It broke his heart.

Whenever he went to Lynn’s place, he listened to symphonic music. Fatelike, it had to happen that just about that time Lynn had gotten in with a Greenwich Village clique of jazzophiles. He’d borrowed a mass of jazz albums and listened to them interminably. Erick could hardly ever listen to classical music.

“Oh boy, have
you
gone to hell!” he’d storm at Lynn.

“Yes
, yes,” Lynn would reply in gauling patience and drift into as careful an intellectual analysis of the jazz as Erick had seen him do with a Mozart string quartet.

And Erick would leave him, casting up a great, hypocritical despair for all lost young intellectuals in the world, struggling to conceive that his outlook was still as broad as ever and that it was Lynn’s that had gone downhill.

Every day, knowing that he was missing wonderful music made him miserable. He’d stop outside record shops and listen to music, sometimes go inside and browse to exhaustion so he could hear music. And he’d grit his teeth when they put on jazz even though he had once liked it. Walk quickly from the shop as though he had been insulted to his face.

And every time he did those things, his alien mind would chuckle and say—Boy are you getting to be a fucking reactionary.

He paid no attention. He
knew
it was otherwise. That he was the only true liberal and the rest were idiotic pleasure hunters, accepting anything as a measure of the day, enjoying only fads, only passing sensations.

Sometimes, he even stopped by apartment houses when he heard a radio playing symphonic music.

But that didn’t happen much. It happened less and less. He didn’t go out much. And finally, by some strange chemistry of the mind, he got used to not having music in his life. At first it proved a shock when he realized, one day that he wasn’t even missing it. But, in time, he wondered if it had ever mattered at all. And, although he enjoyed music when he did hear it, he convinced himself that he could do without it. And whenever he did, his other mind like the hollow mocking voice of some impossible stage prompter would say—That’s because you’re lower now.

The books were gone and he only read newspapers and magazines with pictures. The music was gone and he only listened to the newscasts and the motley jazz that crept serpentine through the wall from the drunk’s room. The fact that the drunk had never hocked his radio gauled Erick.
He
drank. Yet he was better off than Erick.

The diet became steady and grey. Newscasts, magazine prose and jazz. It all reflected in his writing, which got worse and worse, drifting farther and farther from reality with every passing day. Conversely as his life grew more and more flattened by drab reality, his prose lost touch entirely with reality. The only factors remaining equal in both his life and his writing were flatness, drabness, and monotony.

Anyway he was used to pawning things. And the day the old man offered him nine dollars for his watch he almost took it. Shocked and hurt, an old wound re-opened, still, he almost took off the watch and pawned it for nine dollars.

That night he dreamed that he
had
taken the money and that he had met his mother in the street and she had said,

“Erick, you didn’t sell that watch I gave to you, did you? Oh my darling, how could you do it?”

And he had awakened in a cold sweat, shaking helplessly. And stared at the bleak darkness of his room and heard traffic snoring in the street. Reached out to hear music and touched only a bare table top.

Outside:

He heard horns.

He heard the shuddering start of the elevated trains.

He heard motors, smooth humming motors and sharp, rattling gagging motors.

He heard voices, stray bits of dialogue floated to his ears.

He heard fenders shaking.

He heard car doors slamming and the bus doors unfolding shut with a gasp of hydraulic melodrama, heard train doors sliding open, sliding shut, the rubberized ends bouncing.

He heard brakes screeching and grabbing, tires gripping, skidding.

He heard chains rattling.

Men shouted. He heard the shouts and wondered who the men were and wondered what they had to shout about.

Inside:

He heard footfalls on the stairs, in hallways, in rooms.

He heard the door thudding in its frame, sucked by a dragging current of wind.

He heard other doors opening, closing.

He heard the drunken man in the next room coughing and spitting. He heard the man’s radio blaring out an evening’s report of devious calamities in the world.

He heard the old lady’s cat meowing for milk.

He heard the swallowing in his throat.

And, when all other sounds had died away for seconds at a time, he heard the walls crackling. He heard the house settling by centuries into the earth again.

His neck was stiff. It felt as though it were slowly calcifying. He twisted it to try and loosen the knots. The pain shot in waves into his brain.

He had a headache.

It throbbed and burned. There were invisible hands all over his skull. They pressed down calloused palms on his head. They melted together into a steel vise that fit precisely over the contours of his head. Then someone strolled by and started to tighten the vise. They turned the screws blithely.

Something had to give.

Either at the bottom or the top. At the top, his head would pop open, his brains would spout up in an eruption of grey tissue and bloody juices. Or, at the bottom, it would all go down his throat, gorging and choking him. His head kept swelling up into a balloon and then down into a hard, hot lump. It made him dizzy and tiny, gurgling groans rose into his throat.

His bladder was distended again. He reached down and felt it, gasped at the hot shooting pain it caused. He felt his stomach cramping again. The body was not meant to lie motionless like this. The blood slowed down to a lethargic flow, the heartbeat grew sluggish, the process of decay began. Everything stagnated. And he had a bullet in him.

In a fit of pain he pressed down spasmodically on his stomach and felt the hot urine gush out. There wasn’t much. It soaked his underclothes and pants again. It reactivated the smell of the dried-up body wastes. The reek became a cloud that rose up over his body and hung mistlike.

It is the smell of the grave, he thought in revulsion. It smells like the rotting shit of a million horses. It smells like a mountain of decomposed corpses. It smells like an ocean of hot bloody pus. It smells like every desiccated and moldy piece of garbage in the world baked into a pie.

It smelled.

The church bells started their hourly chant again. My dog has fleas. Fleas has my dog. Has my dog fleas? Fleas has my dog. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Seven o’bong and all’s dung. Ding dung hell, turdy’s in the well …

He closed his eyes and stopped his mind from leaking out.

If it would only rain. If it would only rain hard. In buckets. If it would only thunder down and spatter on the window sill so hard that the drops bounced onto him. At least the air would be moist even if the water didn’t reach him. It is even drier in here now with the glass of water empty, he thought. The lost moisture seemed unutterably depressing. Where is the rose? He looked down at the coat. He couldn’t see the rose. Its dark outline was lost in the dark mountain of the coat.
Mountain coat and
…

God, I wish it would rain so hard the house fell apart.

If it would only thunder and lightening. If it would only rain like it did when I was in the army. It always rains worst during wars, it’s a plot. If a thunder clap would only strike the house into matchwood. That would be good. If he were going to die, it may as well be fast. With a bang, with pyrotechnics. God let it rain hard and let me die fast.

His brows furrowed in worried surprise.

He was at it again. But it was there, unmistakably. He faced it squarely. He had to. For the first time. Before this he had skittered around it, side-stepped, avoided it even though he thought he had been facing it. But that was just play acting.

So he held it up and looked at it.

Was he or was he not going to die?

It seemed impossible to deliberate over, actually. It was something one rarely thought of in the twenty-fourth year of life unless he were mortally wounded or ill or just vaguely philosophizing after an evening of good beer and better conversation.

Death.

What actually,
actually
now, was it? How did it feel? How did one greet it?
Was
there a greeting? Was it a sinking sensation or a rising one? A great blackness or a great light?

Death
.

He closed his eyes and thought of death.

It was the greatest mystery. Together with life, it formed the greatest set of mysteries. But death was the deepest one. It was the deepest fear. And the last enemy to be destroyed. The Bible said it, his mother said it. It must be true.

What was it?

Simple, yes, if you just added up the minor details. The stopping of the heart, the freezing of the limbs into implacable rigidity, the breakdown of cells, the cessation of blood flow. And only the hair and the nails still growing stupidly as though nothing in particular had happened.

That was simple on the face of it. Scientists and priests, husbands and lovers say it every day. Everyone knew it yet no one could describe its hidden face. It exempted no one from its class of terrible knowledge. All were parts of its territory. Death
was
a salesman, plying his black wares for all at normal cost.

Death. The most ugly, the most beautiful, the most comforting, the most frightening and awe-inspiring word in the language of men. To say
God
was to speak of dreams and vague unshaped concepts and indecipherable feelings of description. God did not show up in the life that was lived each day and hour and minute and second.