Hunger and Thirst (3 page)

Now there was a numbness running around his waist and moving into the small of his back. He ignored it, thinking only that he must get up and wash his face. He had to get up. It was the only thing left to do in the world. What was to be done after he got up didn’t matter. But he had to get up.

Get up, damn you! He raged and fumed at the stubborn mass of his body. Get up, get up,
get up!
His entire body trembled spasmodically like a land suffering earthquake. He almost expected to see his chest yawn open like severed earth and see his innards spout out like lava.

Suddenly. A click in his throat.

Everything went. His straining muscles let go without his wish, helpless to obey his will. He slumped back on the pillow and felt a large drop of sweat trickle down his right temple and get crushed between his cheek and the pillow.

It seemed beyond belief. Now he became incredulous with outrage. He was the dumbfounded one. “I can’t
do
it!” he gasped as though the information were utterly astounding.

My God, I can’t move myself!

Abruptly his mind plunged into investigation. Come on, get it figured out. He could not accept that there was no hidden key, no ridiculously simple and uninvolved answer to all this. Some minute panacea which could be instantaneously applied and thus enable him to rise and walk as if the entire thing had never happened.

Let’s see now. The old man said—Stop! Yes, that much was clear. But he didn’t stop. And then the old man had coughed. No, it just sounded like a cough. The old man shot at him. That was it. And he ran and ran. And he got back to the room. But there was more to it than that. His brow drew itself together into long wavering lines. There had to be more. Why wouldn’t his brain wake up so he could get it all solved and get up to wash his face?

He had to get up.

There was no question about that. For Christ’s sake he had to get up and go to the bathroom and then he had to pack and put on his hat and coat and stick the money in his wallet and leave. He blinked and tried to remember why. But he knew he had to leave anyway. The reason would come later. Right now what mattered was that he get up and wash his face.

But he couldn’t.

He tried to understand that, searching in repressed fright for the answer.

It was a race. Either fear or realization would come first. It had to be realization. There was an answer and he would find it. Let’s see.

He couldn’t leave. As of now, of course, he meant. He wanted to leave. He willed himself to leave. To get up and walk out of there. But something kept him from it. What? Was something torn or split? Was something broken, shattered, severed? Because he couldn’t move his body. Yes, that was better. There was a bullet in him and it had done something to his system. Simple enough.

Then, fear came again. Knowing it was hardly enough. Knowing he could not move wasn’t much help in getting him to move. And what was going to happen? Hours in the room?

Days?

His mouth fell open. But there was no water and no food and he was hungry and thirsty. And his body, what about that? Already it was swelling with undischarged wastes. What was he to do?

His throat contracted. It was so easy to go over the facts. So hard to accept and understand them. Paralyzed. It was an easy word to speak and to think. But what did it mean? It meant he couldn’t move. Did it mean he would never move again …?

No!

He heard the word shouted out in his mind and it echoed down the corridors.

It was impossible that such a thing be true. He wouldn’t believe it. He couldn’t afford to believe it. He was just in a state of shocked exhaustion. How many times had he read about men in shock? They were like this too, their functions gave way, they couldn’t move.

Well, that’s all it was. What he needed was rest and sleep and warmth. He couldn’t pull the blanket over himself true. He was right on top of it. But it wasn’t cold. The sun was coming up now and the window was only open a little and not much wind was coming in.

Anyway, it was April.

He closed his eyes. With all his will he refused to believe that he couldn’t move at all. Maybe for the moment, yes. But that was shock. That meant only that it was a matter of waiting a while until he was rested up. Until he’d gathered a little strength. That was all.

“I’ll rest a while.”

He said it to himself, casually, straining to believe it was all a thing of simple values.

He turned his head and looked at the rose on the table.

It was drying up. The petals were shriveling and moisture was leaving them. In the glass, the still water was filled with tiny bubbles that clung to the sides like minute glass balloons.

There was something else on the table. He tried to see. Two things. One was a little higher than the other. He couldn’t make them out because he couldn’t focus out of the corners of his eyes.

He turned his eyes back and listened to the traffic sounds.

A car bellowed like a tone-deaf calf bawling. A truck ground up the block in first gear, its gears spinning faster and faster, the pitch of its driving engine rising until it sounded like a human groan. He listened intently until the truck switched into second gear.

He wanted to listen intently to all sounds.

It seemed as though he must be in complete tune with everything so that he could understand and thus adapt his state to the entire state of things and find the way to move again. There was only the trick of learning that held him back from motion.

So he listened and tried to find the pattern behind all the noises so that they would fit into the puzzle and he could see how to rise up and walk.

It didn’t make sense. The better part of his judgment knew it was senseless. But he went on with it anyway, like an intellectual with his religion, blindly devoted to those regimentations which he realizes are anathema to the slightest application of reason. Just a little more and you’ll find the key, he thought, and then you’ll rest and you’ll be fine, you’ll see.

Through his lowered eyelids, he saw the increasing light of day. I wonder what time it is—he thought. And, automatically, tried to raise his left arm so he could look at his wrist watch. His hand stayed limp and still at his side.

He drove down rising fear as one would drive a rising ant hill into sidewalk cracks with a rubbing stamp of ones sole. All right, all
right
, he told himself, shutting his eyes tightly. Never mind that, in a little while you’ll be out of this. Never mind what time it is, it doesn’t matter what time it is.

Breathing heavily, he listened to the drunken man in the next room, snoring. He tried first to ignore, then to quell the insistent throbbing in his bladder. I wonder if it’s distending or anything, the annoying, grating portion of his brain asked.

Think of something else! he yelled back defiantly.

And forced repose on himself.

Now you listen to me, he lectured smugly. You’re going to be all right, do you understand that? In a while, in a little while. All you need is some rest do you see that, you
do
see that, don’t you? You’re in a state of shock from that small wound in your shoulder or back or wherever it is. And you need rest. That’s all. Then you can get up and wash your face.

His throat tickled.

I could use a little water, he thought.

He opened his eyes.

He thought it must be about ten o’clock. It was five minutes to seven. In the sky, the sun climbed. The streets were growling with morning activity.

He looked down at himself.

His pants were tented at the crotch. His pupils expanded. He was very surprised. He hadn’t been thinking about sex, he wasn’t sexually aroused at all. What the hell is this, he thought, why is it so hard?

He blinked at it, couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t understand. It was like some strange construction in the crotch of his trousers going on without his knowledge. An unbidden erection effected by invisible builders.

He kept staring at it. He lay there and looked at it dizzily. He kept blinking. He kept looking at that lump down there and not understanding what had caused it.

It moved.

He was fascinated.

He lost interest.

Somehow it was like the rest of him; detached, something that belonged to another person. In his plight, of what interest was anything that had to do with another person? That bulge in his trousers simply had nothing to do with him.

He looked around the room again. There was no attempt to convince himself that it was a dream now. He knew he was awake, very much awake. The pain in his back was more severe. It felt like a cramp; as if he must raise up and twist his shoulders to unknot the kinks in his back muscles.

He tried at first, when he forgot that he couldn’t move. Then he lay there trembling again, trying to force a screen of blankness on his mind so that the fears would not return and the debilitating imaginations not clutch at him so.

He looked at the room.

Everything was the same. The coat, the hat, the money, the dresser and closet, everything.

His gaze ran over the floor. The rug was dirty and spotty brown. There was a piece of blackened gum scuffed into it.

He’d never noticed it before. It must have been put there by a former occupant of this room. He looked at the piece of gum and imagined the man or woman stepping on it and then lifting their foot gingerly with a muffled curse and looking at the threads of gum their soles were pulling from the rug.

He wished that person was here now to help him.

It seemed very telling that a person had stood right on that spot and stepped on a piece of gum. An actual, living person had stood there. But now he was alone here and that person did not know of him and couldn’t help him. In his sleepy, half-conscious daze, it seemed strangely important and valuable to him. He kept thinking of it as he stared at the rug and the gum. He saw that the rug was made up of three irregularly sized pieces that were sewed together with thick brown twine. He had never seen that before either. Odd, how many things you notice when you have the time, he thought.

There was a magazine lying at the foot of the table that stood by the window. He looked at it.

MOVIES
read the cover, 10.

He saw Ava Gardner sitting in a creamy blue nightgown looking up at him. Her eyes were sleepy and sultry. Her moist red lips were parted a little. There was a lock of dark hair dangling over her creamy forehead. The bodice of her nightgown was cut very low. He could see the healthy brownish-white flesh, the entrance to the valley that ran between her upright breasts. He could feel the softness of her flesh with his eyes. Her shoulders were back and she had her right hand pressed against her hip. Through the silken transparency of the flaring sleeve, he could see her smooth, lightly-haired arm.

His mind asked Ava Gardner—What are you doing down there, how did you fall on the floor?

Ava Gardner looked at him and, to his question, gave no answer. He looked back at her.

In the dreary, waking drone of a city morning they were immobile and gazing at each other.

He looked over her torso and saw her firm, rising breasts and his organ was erect and stiff. But he didn’t feel a thing. He might have been in church so pure and unsullied by libidinous thoughts was he. He looked at her breasts and his eyes observed how lovely they were, how soft and curved and…

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling without caring anymore.

His eyes fastened on the ceiling, the brownish white tint of the ceiling plaster. It was almost the same shade as her flesh. How different the source. Yet the same too. Both the result of thirty odd years of wear and maturation. His eyes saw that, deep-set, lack-lustre eyes. He looked at the plaster falling off. How can a room be so dirty, he wondered, how can it possibly be so dirty and ugly?

The ceiling wavered. His brain slid off its perch and for a split second, he wondered where he was again. Then his eyes, as if to answer the question of his mind, dropped their gaze and he was looking at the money again. And he remembered.

There were five twenty-dollar bills, six, no, seven of them. He could see them by squinting. He tried to remember where his glasses were. He couldn’t remember. He wished he had them though. He felt that if he could see the world more clearly he would be more a part of it and able to return to it the sooner. But the way it was, his myopia caused the world to be blurred. It was not sharp and pin-pointed in detail. It separated him. He was in another bourne. He was apart, just a little bit yes, but still apart, some distance from the maximum point of being alive in the world.

Since he could not see his way back completely, there was only one thing to do.

He must sit up and wash his face.

He had to get out of there. He couldn’t wait. He’d rested. Now he had to get up. The shock must have worn off, he told his system. “All right,” he said. And said it calmly as he could as if by cajoling his body, he could soothe it into motion.

“Now,” he said.

Very calmly, and with a thin assured smile on his face, he tried to sit up.

Muscles pulled in their slack. They tightened. The levers of his skeleton and covering cables began to pull. They jerked once like a mulish derrick, trying to lift him up.

The pain in his back began to throb. He felt as if he were being held against a great spinning carborundum wheel.

And his body stayed. And the smile stayed, frozen hard as his flesh tightened. Rocklike, struggling to sit up, he looked like a pop-eyed, grinning idiot.

“All right!”

His voice became shaky and alarmed again. He lost calm detachment. He lost his assurance and his cloak of forced confidence. He struggled. He pushed and clutched and strained every muscle, his body aching and burning. Breaths blew great bubbles of saliva through the spaces between his clamped teeth. They popped from his lips and broke, running down over his chin. His right hand twitched under him, his body shook like a piece of metal caught and spun by a buzzing drill bit.

He heard the bed springs squeaking, outside the busses roaring and hissing and the cars running along and the trains grinding on their tracks while he, like a shuddering statue, tried to sit up.