Hunger and Thirst (50 page)

Eight
: He wakes up.

He unbuckles his belt and tries to slide it out. He cannot. His body presses it against the bed.

He unzips his pants and feels his organ. He feels how damp and hot his crotch is. He feels a dried up piece of body waste. He picks it out and looks at it groggily. His mouth stirs. Something atavistic stirs. A hint of revulsion flickers in his eyes. His face remains immobile. He drops the piece of excretion. He zips up his pants in cowlike slowness and buckles his belt and is asleep before he finishes doing either one of them.

Nine:
He wakes up and mutters crustily, “Oh, no you don’t.”

Then he goes to sleep again.

Ten
: He wakes up and feels urine dribbling. Half unconscious he unzips his pants and reaches in. He feels the hot urine on his palm. He withdraws his palm and holds it up before his face.

Wet. He looks at the glistening drops.

Something hurts in him. Something cries out—No! His eyes are dull. He feels haunted. His lips move soundlessly. His tongue comes loose from the roof of his mouth.

His hand drops weakly and he feels a horror as he feels the urine soaking into his pants leg. Slight snorting breaths break through his caked nostrils.
Drink, drink
, his mind rumbles. He sobs and looks blindly at the ceiling with hot dry eyes. The eyes close, open, close, open, close.

He falls asleep and he hears a waitress saying, “Water, sir?”

Eleven:
He opens his eyes.

He tries to tear off the buttons of his shirt so he can throw them out the window.

They are sewed on strongly. His fingers ache. He gives it up. He looks at his dirty nails. He stares stupidly at the wrinkled knuckles. He shuts his eyes and hears the church bells and sinks into a torpored blackness.

Twelve:
He wakes up and picks his nose.

His right forefinger probes into the nostril cavities. The dirty nails pick and dig and scrape at the insides of his nose. It reaches way in and moves around the nostril walls. It pulls out red-green chunks of mucus and wipes them on the side of the table. His eyes stare cowlike and stupid at the cracked, dingy ceiling while he picks.

His nose starts to bleed a little. Some of it runs into his throat and he chokes wheezingly and tries to spit it out. Then he swallows it. He lays there silently, swallowing the blood until his eyelids fall forward and his brain drifts off into darkness.

Thirteen
: He wakes up instantly.

He listens to a city truck spraying the street with torrents of cold cleansing water.

His eyes look hollow and sunken in black pits. His lips move feebly and his tongue tries to escape from its hot prison.

It is silent in the street and he thinks he hears every drop gush from the flat spigots, flood across the pavement in bubbling rivers, collide with the gutter sides and spout up and over the sidewalk. He thinks he hears it running along the curb and splatting down in a heavy stream into the sewers.

He lays still as a board and can almost see the water soaking the street and cleansing, purifying. And his throat is on fire with consuming fire. His mouth and throat are hot and dry and dusty and like sandy desert. His throat keeps moving convulsively at the sound of the water, as if he were swallowing it. His right hand clutches his shirt. He listens until the truck has gone far away.

Then a wave of exhaustion tops his keyed up observation. He falls into a pit of dreamless sleep.

Fourteen:
He wakes up. He looks at the ceiling. The room is blurry. He thinks—
They have laid me away in the tomb
.

It was noon.

Down in the street, cars and busses rolled and sped. The glittering sun reflected off their tops and the upflung glitter was strained through the spaces between the fire escape bars and went in golden stripes through his window and angling up to the ceiling.

He looked at the ceiling. Tiny elongated streaks of light moved across the plaster. They looked like flickering missiles or evenly dispersed schools of white fish or a ladderlike formation of leprous rocket ships zooming across a dull-hued plaster universe. They appeared, moved suddenly, disappeared. They appeared all over the ceiling like strange kaleidoscopic patterns. What caused it? he wondered. He couldn’t think straight. His mind wouldn’t concentrate. He was too groggy with sleep and hunger and thirst. His mind ran on and on over everything like a drunken man staggering through midnight streets and seeing everything in a blur, maybe once in a while seeing a clear sight and having a clear thought, then falling away again.

Can’t sleep got to get up Got to get out of here Here and there Can’t lay here Ceiling What’s the matter Something wrong with me? Hurt? Can’t think Can’t remember Been here long time Wednesday? No Tuesday No Oh shit on it Money on the floor Remember something Shoes coat Hey they fell off me No what’s that Oh it’s dead I threw it there Wilted and lifeless and there That’s a pillow and what’s that AAA A keychain When and what say Why am I here I have no business here I should be what Oh I knocked up Leo the bitch knocked her knock me one price on my head What Why is that? Oh, I oh the old man God did I do that? Police in the streets Mustn’t stay here Got to escape I’m thirsty Hey that’s it I’m thirsty!

Here I am Still am Now I see I’m dying What if I die here What would it mean to the world Anything? Nothing How could it world doesn’t even know I’m here Am I dying Am I at all? If no one finds me will I be dead? Objectively that is sire doesn’t there have to be a witness I ask you I think so I don’t think the sky is really blue you know I think it’s blue because I see it blue and you see it blue and so we call it blue how do we know there aren’t people who see it yellow Maybe they do and they’re afraid to tell so they lie about it they don’t want to be outlaws break tradition Suppose some poor honest little bastard says Mama the sky is yellow they’d kick his ass in No dear, it is blue it is blue it is blue Oh goddamn gall of all Goddamn them could kill them all and one day the little bastard is big bastard says By George the sky is blue By George he tells funny anecdote do you know when I was little shaver I thought the sky was yellow Ha ha that’s a pisser I won’t be dead until someone comes in and sees me Landlord first I think He’ll come and superintendent will unlock door and they’ll see my grimy corpse on the bed they will say Oh he is dead and then and only then will I be really dead I will get deader The old lady with varicose veins will say it and the drunk next door say it and Leo will say it and Lynn will and Grace say it say Grace and my mother will no she’s dead I’m dead everyone is dead Every time someone says Oh he is dead! I’m more dead and more dead and after a while I’ll be so dead I’ll be dead …

What?

Say what the world do if no people on it What would it do if all of us were gone It would look around and say By Gum they’re all gone and there’s no one to say I live on the world so there’s not the slightest proof that there’s a world so—Poof! it would be gone. Gone with the wind. Took her ten years Why didn’t I ever stop this my head is hot and my belly is hot and my GODAMN IT GIVE ME SOMETHING TO DRINK ORI SWEAR TO GOD I’LL CUTOFF …!!!!!!!!

You know what would be funny? If the day I die they started dropping bombs all over and the atmosphere ignited and the whole planet was crushed into dust and flushed about the universe like tasty bits of food down the gullet of infinity and the other planets would shift and they’d start crashing into each other and Velikovsky would be sitting in a rowboat out there taking notes. You know what would be funny if the day I died they started dropping bombs all over and Say if this room is getting smaller I bet it is In the night it gets big when the heat goes but the daytime it gets small when the heat comes The walls are shady and smooth no they’re filthy and cracked and chipped oh GOD THEY’RE STONE AND THEY’RE DRIPPING No they I’m just …

I wonder if I remember the commandments I think so Mom taught me good Thou shalt not kill Thou shalt not bow down to any graven image Thou shalt not commit adultery Hee Hee everyone commits adultery Who pays for it God gets his kicks in later haah? Who says you don’t think in sentences I’m no Mrs. Bloom lying in bed and musing on past fucks I’se a muggin I’m … THIRSTY!!! Oh god I’m so thirsty Goddamn it won’t you understand you idiot No maybe you don’t Listen I’ll explain it you stupid I mean Stoppid I mean OH YOU GODDMAN STUPID IDIOT WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME! Oh God. God God God God God God I’m so thirsty thirsty thirsty thirsty Oh please give me please please please PLEASE give me something to drink I don’t care give me anything Lynn put it in my mouth I’ll drink it I swear to God I.….OH GOD!

Oh yeah?

Because for all the order there is time ten times as much disorder Everybody looks for order Consider the snowflake Horse shit Stop looking for order Why don’t they list the disorder in the Hey you I’d drink blood I’d drink gasoline if they drowned me in water I’d do it What am I doing here I think I’ll get up and wash my face …

At two thirty he picked up the fragment of mirror and looked into it. He looked at the motionless features, the calm resigned lips, the straight nose, the gentle uncondemning eyes. He kept staring at himself for almost twenty five minutes.

After a while two small tears rolled down his cheeks and he wondered, without astonishment, how he would look if he were wearing a crown of thorns.

The door rattled. The window rattled. He woke up and found he really wasn’t in a strait jacket it only felt that way.

He lifted his arm from his chest and let it drop weakly onto his right leg. He took a deep shuddering breath of the scorching air. A lump moved into his throat. He swallowed it. He could feel himself drying out like a piece of clothing in the sun. The moisture was going, going.

He hardly felt the hunger now. It seemed odd but he was grateful for it. Once in a while his stomach gurgled but the contractions were less and less violent and he wasn’t ill. The only sign was the growing weakness, the way his right hand shook more and more every time he picked it up. Like it was hanging from a wire in the wind.

It was the thirst.

It was creeping up on him, gaining. It didn’t slacken, become a dull, unimportant need like food. It got worse and worse. Every second made the torture a little more horrible. Every noise was beginning to sound like the splashing of water to him. When the pangs were at their worst, he wished, he prayed to die quickly so it would be over with. This lying and waiting—it was torture. There wasn’t enough ideas, enough memories to fill the void. Or if there were he was too tired to think of them, too weak. Besides he couldn’t, not when the need for water was crowding everything else out.

Time dragged.

It got slower and slower as if each passing minute were attaching itself to the present ones like weights and dragging along behind, holding time back.

He was slept out. He was dizzy and half unconscious but still he was tired of sleeping. There must be something to do, he thought. Some effort to contact the world or, at least, some means of preparing for the end.

The end. Two silly words. He could say them and think them but it did no good. He couldn’t visualize himself at an end. He couldn’t actually believe he was going to die. Other people died. Not him. All his life it was that way. His uncle, his cousin, his father, his mother and, during the war, the other ones, Lindel and Foley and Moscowitz and Sergeant Jones. Never him. It not was possible. Death simply wasn’t something in his life. It was impossible that it had finally caught up with him.

Impossible. True.

He tried to sleep. He had to sleep. Waking was torture. He closed his dry aching eyes thinking that he’d give his arms and legs if someone would pour a sprinkler can of water over him until he drowned.

He couldn’t sleep. His head throbbed. He saw dark red instead of blackness and saw the outlines of the faces on the ceiling and the walls—the father bear and the old witch and Long Island.

And the city wouldn’t lie still under him.

It heaved and bucked and throbbed like a land sustaining an earthquake. Everything rumbled, the cars and busses, trucks and trains. Someone pushed a lopsided, metal-wheeled wagon down the street under his window. He heard pots and pans sliding and rattling on the wagon. The building trembled and trembled like the body of an old woman. The bed shook when people walked on the stairs or trucks thundered by. He felt each vibration flow into his left foot and run up the calf of his numbed leg. It seemed as if every noisemaker in the city were crouching with ears pricked to see when he wanted to sleep. They all made a bargain. They were a legion of plotters. Each one said—I’ll make a sudden shrill noise whenever no one else is doing it. We’ll alternate so that there’s never a moment of complete silence except once in a while to catch him off guard so that the next noise will flatten him. But we must almost never have all noises at once. We must not waste our aggravation.

And so it was. One continuous stream of gathering horns, wheels, chains, voices, footfalls, slamming doors et al. And once in a while, just for the impression, they’d all join forces and knock the stuffings out of him.

They did. They all worked together at their meticulous orchestration of din, their harmony of nerve-wracking discords. They struggled to keep him awake. And kept him awake.

For a while.

The only reason they lost the fight after a while was that he was starving and dying of thirst. And too weak to keep assimilating the waves of noise. In an hour or so his weary body sucked in rest and he slept heavily and, sluggishly, like a subject in trance, lying there on the bed, chest hardly moving.

And, somewhere in his brain, he heard a voice and wondered if it were his own voice saying — “This is Golgotha, ladies and gentlemen, on your left you will see …”

Five o’clock. Crush hour.

The buildings opened wide and spit out a trickle, a flow, a gush of clicking-shoed men and women. They brushed out into the warm evening air, their arms laden with books and packages and overnight work. The bobbing flow of them became a current on each sidewalk, pulsing, rushing current that swept noisily up the elevated steps, turned a corner, passed through turnstiles with a great ringing of dimes, and spinning of spokes, entered and split into two directions on the platform, gushed through doors and doors and doors, settling on mesh seats and swaying with the motion of the trains and hanging on straps, reading evening papers.