Hunger and Thirst (4 page)

“No!”

He could not stifle the cry as his muscles lost grip and strength slid from him. And, although he had not risen at all, it seemed as if he fell back, slumping heavily on the mattress, gasping with open mouth, his body swelling and throbbing with great waves of pain.

One brown-trousered leg was thrown over the edge of the bed. His hands were motionless, five pronged lumps of dry, dirty flesh. He looked like a marionette taken from its box and tossed there carelessly, unable to move or compose its floppy limbs.

Oh, my God, it’s true.

The inner chamber of his mind spoke as if alarmed but he knew it wasn’t. Its work was undiminished, its scope unlimited by this paralysis. It could go on clicking until he rotted. But the words came anyway.

It is true. I am awake. I am paralyzed. I am in my room on Third Avenue and I cannot move myself.

He turned his gaze and looked dizzily at the dying rose.

It was pallid and curling up. His eyes moved. He saw the other two objects. His head must have moved, he thought in surprise.

One of the objects he still didn’t remember. But suddenly he recalled that the other one, the higher one, was a bar of candy.

I’m hungry, said his brain as if cued in.

For a moment it enraged him how predictable the body was. He saw a candy bar and his stomach bespoke the need for food. And he saw the water and immediately his body called for water.

For a long moment, he felt superior to the childish expectable dictates of his body.

Then he forgot it, then he didn’t care. He could not follow any train of thought fully. His brain slipped and slid over thought like a poor, bundled-up traveler walking over slick winter ice. He looked at the candy bar again. I’m hungry, said his stomach.

He was.

His stomach felt empty. The more he thought about it the emptier it seemed. The walls seemed to be sucking themselves in just to be annoying, to make him hungrier. He tried to raise a hand to push against his stomach, forgetting. Only his right hand stirred slightly under his leg. He closed his eyes. I’m hungry, he said to force out the other thoughts. I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry…

Until he was hungry.

Now his organ was subsiding. He watched as the small hill in his pants began to sink, quivering as it fell. My bladder
is
distended, he thought, my God I have to go.

For a moment the spasm of burning and pain gripped him tightly. Then it passed, leaving him cold and shaky.

And wondering, in rising terror, what was going to happen to him because he was hungry and thirsty and had a terrible need to empty his body of its piling wastes.

But he couldn’t move.

He was back in the army.

He was in bed and it was Sunday morning so he didn’t have to get up. He was exhausted. They had just come back from a twenty mile hike. He felt exhaustion in every muscle of his body.

He had his eyes open and was looking at the ceiling. There was a bar of sunlight falling across the floor and bending up and over the foot of his bed. Through the sheet he felt the warmth, like the caressing of a hand. The heat traveled up his legs and into his body.

He was thinking about sex.

His hands were under the blanket feeling and pressing. The heat made him feel soft and pliable and he was breathing heavily, pressing insistent fingers into his groin.

Leonora came down the long barracks aisle.

He knew she was coming, he didn’t even have to look. He felt her slippers on the floor. He heard their soft blueness and smelled their clicking. The other men in bed all whistled softly but they knew she was his.

And she came to him and the cot springs squeaked as she sat down beside him, wearing a blue silk nightgown and smiling down at him, stoking his tousled hair.

“Hello Ava,” he said and when he said it, her mouth turned down and her face grew very stern.

“Why did you call me Ava?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m just kidding you,” he said, “Because I saw a magazine on the rug in my room and the rug has a piece of gum scuffed into it and it was a picture, a
photograph
of Ava Gardner on the cover and she had on a blue silk nightgown like the one you have on so I thought it would be pretty funny to call you Ava.”

She smiled. She said, “Oh,” and she smiled again. She bent over to kiss him and the bodice of her gown fell away from her small firm breasts.

He felt her hair fall over both his cheeks and he was in a house of warm hair and her lips were warm and she was tickling his mouth with the tip of her tongue. And while she was kissing him he said, “Say John,” to the boy sleeping in the next cot, “You don’t mind if I lay her, do you?”

“Golly, it’s all right with me Erick,” John Foley said in his sleep, hugging his rifle.

He felt all right then. And he opened his mouth and she pulled the sheet off his body and everybody was laughing and whistling but he didn’t care. “Do you care?” he asked Leonora and she said, “I don’t care.”

He kissed her neck and pulled the gown over her shoulders and pulled it down until it slid out and over the hills of her breasts and slipped off her rigid nipples and dropped whispering to her waist. He kissed her hot flesh.

Everything sped and ran. She was lying under him and moaning Oh darling, oh darling, keep it up, keep it up but all of a sudden he had to stop. I’m sorry Leo honey he said I have to go to the No you don’t she said and she was angry and hot. But I have to Leo don’t you understand I’ll only be a minute. No! she said angrily or I’ll scream and wake up your mother. I have to Leo and he ran naked down the long splintery barracks aisle and jumped down the stairs to the latrine and stood leaning his head against the damp wall over the urinal and watching himself and John was next to him in the Central Park toilet and he said to John—Say, John is this the pause that refreshes or is this the pause that…

He woke up with a shudder.

His organ was erect again and urine was pouring out of it. He felt it running and splashing down his stomach and crotch, dribbling over his thighs. It was hot. He saw the enlarging spot of wetness in his pants, saw a tiny spurt of yellow fluid come out between the buttons on his pants. It soaked him.

He didn’t care.

He was smiling and his eyes closed again and he shivered and relished the feeling of hot urine pouring over him. He felt excited and happy, breathing in deeply through gritted teeth as the urine flooded over him endlessly, soaking down under him, blotted up by the bed clothes. He didn’t feel his bladder working. He just felt the hot wetness and it seemed as if someone were pouring it over his lower extremities.

When it finally stopped he sighed in sleepy satisfaction, still half in the dream. I don’t care Leo, he either said or thought. I’ll do it again. I love it, it’s wonderful, I love it, I love it, I
love
it.

The room began to drift and melt away. Blackness, warm and comforting dropped over him and shut his eyes with gentle fingers. He slept, his long body warm and moist and comfortable. Slept without dreams.

Like in a warm place, very nice. A warm, wet, dark place.

It was almost nine.

People hurried to work. They jumped down from bus steps. They came from the earth, a disgorged flow of pumping legs and arms and bobbing heads. They came thumping down the steps from the elevated platform, a swelling line of them, hurrying to work under the grey blue April sky.

The sun was up but not yet visible in the sky. It lay hidden behind a thin layer of grey. The sky was filled with an endless column of puffy continents drifting along slowly.

No one in the street looked up at them.

Everyone’s eyes looked down at the dirty sidewalk or straight ahead toward their destination; the office or the shop or the factory. Some of the people stopped for brief moments to gaze in brief coveting at the window displays. Some of them gazed dumbly and passed on, unsold. Others made mental notes to return when pay day came. Others simply looked with neither the intent to buy nor interest in the product, drawn in by a sign, a picture, a certain twist of display.

The street was turgid with yellow-topped busses, bulky, thick-wheeled garbage trucks, their bodies a pale white, their tires black and spiked. And streams of private cars and taxicabs. The heavy rumble of their forward movement shook the house. It made the dirty walls tremble, sent tiny clouds of plaster dust into the air, formed motes of dust in the air. It stirred the bubbly water in the glass. It made the wilting rose jiggle in its place.

He was still asleep, cold and shivering, dreaming of snow and winter.

The room was chilly and the soggy underwear and pants clung to his flesh like cold wet paper. He stirred restlessly, his right hand jerking a little. Then it pulled out completely from beneath his leg as a wintry blast struck the him that dreamed.

He shuddered and moaned and his eyes fluttered open.

He looked dully at the ceiling.

His eyes felt caked over with a hard dry crust. It still stabbed at the corners of his eyes. It annoyed him and he wanted to wipe it away.

His throat was dry. His tongue shifted sluggishly as he licked his lips.

There he was. Still there. Whatever hope that it had been a dream was now gone for good. It was as real as anything was real. He tried to sit up. But there was no point in it. He couldn’t sit up. He just lay there without moving, staring up at the ceiling.

His back and right shoulder were still cold.

Now his crotch and thighs and upper legs were cold too. The rest of his body was more or less comfortable. It was getting warmer outside. Sunlight was beginning to pierce through to the ground. It was easing out the knotted muscles of the city and himself. Everything was running smoother.

The traffic sped and parted and throbbed and rumbled, never ending. And lives come and go, he thought, and eyes open on the mystery of life and eyes close on the mystery of death and still the traffic moves on, the elevated trains fleeing from station to station and back again. And back again. And again.

Or do they?

He drew in a shuddering breath.

There was an odor to the room. He was beginning to get it. An odor of the old, the drying and the decaying. All mingled with the pungent, musky odor of his urine-soaked trousers. It was the smell of dying things.

He asked the question of no one.

“What am I to do?”

And when he asked to know, his eyes flickered like pictures on a haunted screen and no one could tell what things were in his eyes.

Again, he looked at the rose, still drying, still shriveling, the outside petals pulling away from the center folds.

It was like some rare fruit being peeled by the atmosphere. The petals would pull away, one by one through the coming hours and drop onto the white dusty towel which was supposed to be a table cloth.

And suddenly a feeling of intense might dropped on him and he closed his eyes, his heart beating quickly.

What does it
mean
to lie paralyzed? To lie paralyzed and look at a dying rose? It had to mean something. The complete thing, the affair in its entirety.

How many times had he been walking or standing or sitting, no matter where, and, suddenly, looked up and said or thought in the profoundest wonder—how long has
this
been going on?

But this portion of it; lying paralyzed in a room on Third Avenue in New York in April.

What did it signify?

It had to mean something. It simply had to have some intimation of purpose. What was it in the wide world, in the vast universe that he should be here in this ugly, rotting room, unable to get up? What did it mean that his overcoat was a jumbled, caverned lump of wool on the dirty, spotted rug, that bills of large denomination made a pattern of scroll-worked green on the light brown rug?

And that he, a human being, an amalgam of nerves and tendons and muscles and flesh and skin and a brain and vague hopes for a soul—was shot? Shot in the back by a wizened, miserly old man.

Was there a meaning? Certainly there were facts. The facts were clear. He was in room 27 of this particular house on Third Avenue and the walls were green and thickly, clumsily plastered and cracked. And there was one wall board showing over there where the plaster had fallen off. That was by the other table on which his typewriter rested, silent and aloof. The wardrobe closet door was slightly ajar and so were all the drawers in the dresser but the bottom one and the mirror on top had a thin layer of dust hanging on its surface and the rose was dying.

Was there a pattern for all that?

He felt dizzy, trying to discover it. As he had always grown dizzy when he sought a meaning to everything, a template that fitted over all the parts.

And, in the dizziness, the edges of the room clouded again and he blinked his eyes.

“
Is
there?” he asked

But the walls were silent. And he tried to sit up so he could wash his face. But he couldn’t move. Only his right hand twitched a little.

I can’t move
.

That was the crux of it. That he had soaked himself like an impotent child or that there was money on the floor or that the rose was dying—all that was unimportant.

He couldn’t move. That was the only thing.

The rest was emptiness. The rest might as well not exist for all its importance.

If there were no coat on the floor and no hat tilted against the chair back and no scraps of financial paper on the rug and no peanut butter assailing the air with its putty flavor and no shriveling rose—what difference would it make to him?

Those things revolved about him. And he couldn’t move. Therefore they were worthless. The coat was worthless because it was of value only to wear and keep him warm. He couldn’t get up to put it on so it was of no value. The money was worthless because he didn’t have the means to get up and spend it.

That was why he had wondered if the trains really went on running after a person died.

It could have been that the entire universe was just a ruse to fool him and that everyone had their own universe of the mind. And it could also be that he was the only one and that it was all—the people and the cars and the trees and the skies and stars and all—put there to dupe him. And when he died there would no longer be any need for it to go on. So that the trains might disappear and the world and the universe go—
pop!—
just like that, the very instant breath ceased in his lungs.