Hunger and Thirst (6 page)

He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Because the sight of his own naked morals proved the ugliest view he could ever remember.

No, you can’t tell the drunk, he told himself, he isn’t an honest man, not to be trusted.

And, in perverted homilies, he lost the uncomfortable sense of self that had stolen unwished upon him a moment before.

He blew out a heavy, impatient breath.

It was becoming maddening to lie there immobile and helpless and hear the radio, hear the announcer talking loud as life, hear the drunk coughing and spitting and shuffling about his room. And to hear doors slamming everywhere in the house as if to torture him and to hear feet on the stairs and know that there were people all around him. And the only one who was awake and close enough was not to be trusted even in such a moment of desperation.

It seemed unnatural to be fussy at such a moment. But he had to be. He had gone to terrible forced lengths to get that money and he couldn’t lose it now. There was time to think, he could find a better way. Maybe he could contact the old woman. There must be many ways. It seemed impossible that in a world rich with variegated circumstances he should be faced with only one alternative.

But he couldn’t spend too much time thinking.

Time was passing. He was hungry. And what happened when he really got hungry? And thirsty? He was thirsty now. His stomach felt like a vacuum and his mouth and throat were clinging dry. He licked his lips. How long can a man go without water? he wondered to himself. Food, he knew, you could get along without for quite a while. After a long while it wasn’t even a necessity.

But what about water?

He’d never thought about it much. He recalled reading or hearing that the body was over 90% water. The thought was appalling. We’re practically walking lakes, he thought. One never thought of himself as being so much fluid.

He had lived in the city and there was always water. He drank it without thought. He absorbed it from all foods and all liquids. He constantly refueled the huge reservoir in his body without a single thought as to what he was doing. Now he was faced with depletion.

How long could a man go without water? He thought.

It was a thought that never occurred to one who lived in a city where artificial veins brought him all the supply he needed. In abundance the consciousness of need disappeared entirely. No, not entirely. But it was held in abeyance in that strange cluttered storehouse where all fixations and doubts and hungers resided in dusty, tranquil silence waiting for the bidding of necessity.

He seemed to recall having read about some Mexican Indian who had lasted ten days without water. Of course that had been in a desert. But the Mexican had been able to move. He had drunk his own urine over and over until evaporation had used it all up. He had just managed to reach an outpost. Otherwise he would have died. To die without water must be a terrible way to…

He stopped breathing.

Two hands had clamped him sandwich like between them and were suddenly crushing the breath from him. His lips trembled and, speechless, horror-stricken, he stared at the ceiling.

Die?

The word was a knife in him. He remembered that from the war.

No! He fought the idea. It was ridiculous to think of dying. He was only 24 years old, at a peak of physical life. There was too much to be done, too much writing to be finished. No, it was out of the question. He tried to force the thought aside as one did when a thought seemed to have no weak point but must be shunted aside in its entirety lest it displace everything else.

He pushed it aside. Scoffed at it. “Absurd”, he muttered defensively.

Never mind, he argued, hadn’t he felt imperiled by death when he was in combat? It was a natural and predictable concomitant of frightening moments. But he hadn’t died in combat had he?

How do you know? asked his inner mind. He pushed it aside weary of its roguish insertions.

No, he hadn’t died than and he wasn’t going to die now either. Everyone was afraid of death, it didn’t mean a thing to be afraid of it. The thing that mattered was not bowing to the fear. He flung it aside. There’s nothing in
that
, he told himself and decided the issue was closed.

There were other things. Admitted things. He
was
hungry and he
was
thirsty. Something had to be done about…

His eyes turned as if on activated swivels.

Well, of course.

How could he have been so stupid? There was a glass almost three quarters filled with water. That was the answer right there. Nothing could be more obvious. Oh, it might not taste like water from a sparkling stream but what did that matter? He wasn’t sleeping at the Waldorf Astoria either. It was water, that was the essential point.

And-of course!

The candy bar. There it was all placed before him like the simple plan it was. What was there to fuss over? In the world of possibilities, one had come forward with simple tread.

He had water, he had food.

Now then.

This condition couldn’t last indefinitely. He was convinced of it. It just didn’t make sense that it should. The body was a wonderful agency for self healing.

All right, say it would last half a day. All right. Give it twenty-four hours at the outside.

One day then. By then the shock would have worn off, nerve centers would have re-knit and he would get up and wash his face, enjoy his long-deferred washed face. That was all. No point in hysterics. Life was not a hysterical thing. Only the weaker minds made it so.

But first he had to move his hand, his right hand. That was necessary at least. So he could get at the water and the candy.

He tried to lift it.

His eyes were fastened to the quivering arm. He watched the fingers tremble. He poured all the energy of his will into that arm. In ordinary circumstances, recited his mind, you could climb a tree or run a mile with all the energy you are piling into the lone flaccid arm.

As he drove spurts of energy into it, he tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his back.

Lift up!

He closed his eyes as if conserving that effort required to hold up the lids might be just the added increment needed to raise his arm. He pulled and fought at it savagely, his mouth sagging open unheeded and breaths pulsing through the tooth cavity.

Effort. More severe. His lips drew back from coated teeth. “Come
on
, come
on
!” He heard the voice grating in his mind. His legs were taut, so taut that he thought they would shatter like glass if struck with a hammer. He felt his bowels and glands like twisted balloons with hands dragging over them, squeaking the tight rubber, threatening to burst them. He saw with a glance that his penis was hardening again, completely without his voluntary effort. And he knew that strength was going and threw in every last reserve of power.

His hand lifted from the bed.

Up. Up. Slowly. Slowly now. He jerked open his eyes and watched it eagerly as if it were some separate creature, some fantastic Sandor performing an unbelievable feat of strength for him, sitting in the grandstand, enthralled. His face was tight and expectant, twisting and quivering emphatically with the performer.

Get it up! That’s it, that’s it, you’ve got it, you’ve
got
it!

He felt his mouth trembling violently, his eyes wide open and staring. There.
There!
His mind shrieked. You’re doing it!
You’re doing it!

His hand flopped on the bed.

Fallen. Beaten.

And his lips drew back suddenly as a tortured sob contorted his face beyond the resemblance to a human face.

“No, no, no, no, no…”

All resolve left him. The strength of body gone, the strength of mind sapped too. As if he had converted even brain energy into fuel for his muscles.

Wrinkling skin encased his eyes and tears ran down his dry cheeks. His pale lips shook and he cried as though his heart had broken. Wept like a helpless, frustrated baby, his lips forming a twisted square of flesh, his chest jerking with fitful sobs.

The tears ran into his mouth.

In the first moment of sudden excitement at feeling moisture, he sucked at them eagerly.

But they were salty and they made him gag and cough. Then a load moan collapsed his chest and he cried in hopeless pain, in anguish, his body a throbbing mass of twisted muscles, raw and numb and aching.

“Mother.” He sobbed it again and again,

“Mother.
Help me
.”

Something thumped down on the floor.

He opened his eyes in fright and looked down.

It was a cat, a scrawny, brown-striped cat. It had come in through the six inch opening in the window. It was crouching on the floor looking at Erick in suspicious fear, leveling its yellow-green eyes at him.

It extended one paw, still looking at him, then took a cautious step into the square of sunlight on the splintered, dust-coated floorboards. Its wide orbs of eyes never left him. They were two untrusting moons.

Erick stared at it.

In the first half-waking moment, he thought it was a visitation. He was too groggy to be sure. He forgot where he was. He blinked at the cat and heard an elevated train grind to a stop at the station. Was that the ghost of a cat?

He blinked.

No, it was a cat. A real cat. He saw it now as he blinked away the crust of sleep.

The cat was advancing into the room, eyes wide and still very suspicious, ears flattened back on its head, looking as if it really lived in that room and had just come back from a weekend trip to find this strange usurper in his quarters.

It moved another step and one dirty paw pressed down on Ava Gardner’s face. The cat lowered its head and sniffed in momentary speculation at the magazine. Erick saw the black nostrils dilate. Then its head sprang up again as though he had moved threateningly. It jumped to the side, looking at him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

He spoke seriously as though the cat would answer back–I’ve just dropped in to borrow a cup of sugar.

The cat looked at him warily with the never-ending fear of harm from all strangers that tenement cats had. Erick ran his gaze over its gaunt mottled body from the tip of its bleak nose to the tip of its straggly tail.

The cat moved across he rug as if stalking a mouse, eyes always on him. He didn’t know what it was looking for.

It belonged to the old woman in the next room, the old, thin-lipped woman who was a desiccated and frayed bit of ancient bone and skin. She had lived in the house for years and years. She had a large sitting room. It had the only easy chair in the entire house.

Once Erick had looked in there the door was slightly ajar. He had seen her sitting in the easy chair in an old red patterned wool wrapper and staring down at the street. He had seen her bony ankles, the tallow-white skin of her calves knotted with purplish, bulging varicose veins. She had sat there without moving, the breeze ruffling her flat, gray hair, her dried-up old lips puckering and flattening as though she were preparing kisses for some spectral lover.

Her cat had been on the fire escape sunning itself that day.

Now the cat was in his room. It was moving around like a four-footed house detective looking for clues. It sniffed and it pried. And always it kept looking at Erick with its suspicious yellowish eyes.

He thought – I’ll write a message in blood and put it in the pussy’s teeth and the pussy will carry it straight to the old lady and she’ll come and rescue me, she’ll come bobbling and shuffling in with hot soups and water and ancient Florence Nightingale touches.

He closed his eyes with a shudder. He was awake enough to lack appreciation for thoughts of what he considered the impossible.

When he opened his eyes the cat was on his overcoat

It was spread out over it, half crouching, digging and pumping its long black scimitar claws into the silk lining, pressing its dirty body against it. Erick heard vibrating purrs rise up from its scrawny throat and saw the throat pulsing with them when he squinted his eyes.

He watched the body writhing with life and motion.

It looked as if its were greased and sliding back and forth in the tight sheath of its skin. He watched the claws drawing back and forth, clutching and tearing. The coat was worth something after all, he thought. He looked at the magazine. You look as though somebody stepped on your face, he thought.

He chuckled quietly.

For some strange, suddenly born reason, he felt comfortable. He wasn’t too hungry. His throat was only a little dry.

And he had company.

He guessed that that was the most important thing. He wasn’t alone. The most awful thing is being alone. The phrase occurred to him, dredged up from some hole he had dug in the clouded past.

Pussy cat pussy cat where have you been? The chant rose up singing in his mind. And he watched the cat sniffing at the bills.

It drew back one paw and cuffed one of the bills playfully. No. it wasn’t playfully, he amended. It just struck out at the bill. Cats that lived in squalor seemed to lose their sense of humor in the relentless drive to survive. It just hit at the bill as though it were an enemy. Erick watched idly. It was a twenty dollar bill.

And that’s all the money is good for too, he thought, to give a pussy cat some toys to bat around.

The cat turned then and moved to the door in a low-slung, supple motion.

It reached up one paw and scratched. “Meow.” It said and scratched.

Without a thought, he tried to get up so he could let out the cat.

But it was as if he were tied down fast. Only his right hand twitched. His right leg and ankle and foot were numb. His right leg felt like a huge heavy block of fragile glass that might at any moment break off and shatter on the floor.

He looked back at the cat.

“Sorry, pussy, “he croaked.

It startled him to hear his voice. One moment he could talk and then he couldn’t. When the cat had come in, his voice had been more or less normally pitched. Now it was a gurgled rasp. He swallowed the lump in his throat.