Hunger and Thirst (7 page)

The cat kept scratching.

Scratch, scratch, scratch as if it had decided to claw its way through the door. It irritated Erick now. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. God damn stupid pussy cat! He thought angrily. I’d like to stand over you and pump bullets into your body.

In his mind he saw the bullet torn body lying in a pond of blood on the floor and it made him shudder.

He tried not to listen to its scratching. He thought of something else. He thought of the door to the hall. He thought of the dusty hall itself and the scuffed rug out there with the floorboards showing through in places.

And he thought of the bathrooms.

He thought of himself sitting in the bathroom. Planning. Sitting and planning in the bathroom with the sickly yellow bulb light glowing over his loins.

It stank there.

The man in room 28 had just finished using it. He was drunk again and he’d urinated all over the front part of the toilet seat. Erick had to wipe it off and it soaked through the toilet paper and got his fingers wet and almost made him sick.

It was silent and airless in there. Like a tucked away cell, an illuminated closet.

The wall he leaned against was cold. It was a green wall bumpy and plastered over and over and over. Whenever any of the plaster fell off, they slapped more of it on. It was so misshapen that Erick often thought it could have been the wall from Poe’s story, the lumps conceivably taking on the shape of Montressor’s enemy stashed away for good.

The toilet seat was green too.

It was scraped through to the wood in various places, in swirls that looked like segments of a circle edge. Around where the crotch rested mostly, the paint worn off by endless sitting people and their eroding groins.

He thought of all the different kinds of crotches that had rested there on that toilet seat. A history of groins that stretched back through the years crossed his mind. Dirty and scabrous and diseased groins most probably; the house was a hang-out for the refuse of the city.

He used to worry about getting diseases from sitting there. He used to pull off reams of toilet paper and wipe the seat clean with brisk motions. Then he pulled more paper off the rack and spread it over the worn word of the seat and sat down gingerly lest he push aside one part of the paper covering and come in contact with the germ-laden wood and they pounce on him.

Now he just sat there and thought about all the ugly people who had sat there before him, emptying their bowels and their bladders. He thought of them as a vast, faceless army of defecators and urinators, totally without name or personalities; exuding vegetables.

He sat there and thought of them but only vaguely, without caring. Way down underneath he was thinking about something else.

It had a unique smell, that bathroom.

Like some rare kind of gas, some new subtle odor that some deranged munitions maker had devised to unhinge the reason of enemy troops. Blended of old urine and old excrement and old tobacco; the piquant and delicate amalgam hanging in the air.

Bathroom
. Half his mind on the fantasy of it. That would be a good name for a perfume. Sell it to misanthropes and anti-sexual old maids.
Bathroom. Eau De Urine. Essence of Shit. Fragrance of The Crotch
. All these and many more. The names crowded his brain. It was a true and frightful discovery.

He listened to his urine dribble down and join the swill-heavy water below. His eyes were fastened on the toilet paper.
Palmer’s No Waste
, said the rack, proudly. You pulled at the paper and it snapped back sharply and cleanly. Disappoints a man, he thought, he cannot find surcease for sorrow.

But only thought of it in small part. Most of his brain, the inside part, the important part, was working on something else.

A problem.

He stared at the bath tub with his flecks of green pupils.

The bathtub was designed for a midget who had no legs. The base of it was green. The faucets were almost green too but not because they were painted green. They were a discolored green, stained brass.

He looked at the tub and wondered if anyone had ever bathed in it. Had anyone ever actually stripped naked in this dingy, wall-undulating cubicle, run hot water and sat down in that dusty enamel bin and washed away the grime of the city?

Never. No one. The people who lived in this house didn’t care for cleanliness of the body. It meant little.

No, he had to take it back. Maybe the old lady scrubbed off her parchment flesh at periodic intervals, then leaped out onto the dirty bath mat so she wouldn’t dissolve and go down the drain with the rest of the lost and the used.

He looked around still, his brain working on something else. The problem.

Crooked. That was the keynote of the bathroom. (And his room and the house too, everything was crooked.) The towel rack there on the door and the mirror and the sink and the floor.

He looked at the floor.

The little tiles were six-sided. Like the paving in the zoo, he thought suddenly, brain still at work.

It made him sit up straight for a moment and forget the other thing. It was strange to find as if by accident that his brain was still alive with memories. It made him shake his head. It was a strange unnatural feeling. He felt as a prisoner might who, after twenty years, is returned to the world and the people he knew. An unfamiliar, strange, drawing back sensation. As if he could no longer adjust to being a part of the world. That was how he felt when he saw that the tiles on the floor were like the tiles in the zoo.

For he remembered the past.

He shook his head, clamped himself back inside the dungeon of the bathroom. With his eyes, he followed the crazy line of the crack that ran through the small tiles.

It was a highway, a madman’s highway. It was constructed from a blueprint drawn up in melancholia by a paranoiac engineer.

He imagined for a moment an actual man in a great, soaring building late at night bending and poring over his drawing table and meticulously, designing the blueprints for that crack through the tiles in this tiny bathroom.

Look at it run, his mind observed. Look at it meander and wander and roam across the floor like an indented snake. “
Roaming in the gloaming”
. He was humming it unconsciously.

It became conscious and he stopped and went back to his other problem.

Not consciously, not with the strained effort of study, with the teeth-clenched effort to concentrate that he used to effect when studying for college examinations. Here the work was picked at deep in the lowest mines of his brain. Patterns formed unseen. The secret invisible builders made the edifice of decision within him but he could not hear or feel their hurried steps and hammering.

Money. He knew that was the starting point. But the working out was something else.

He sat silently, looking down at himself.

I’m even, half his brain observed. Yes, I’m very even. I have two legs on each side, I mean one. And one in the middle to satisfy the dirty purists. The third leg. Pivot of such a great to do. Fulcrum of chicanery.

He drew back his army shirt and looked at it.

There you are, he thought. There you are, caught between two beefy, lard-encased thighs. Look at you, poor, misguided macaroni, your pubic hairs aglow in the dingy bulb light. Your head adrip with the rain drops of the bladder. Safety catch of the flesh machine. Subject to the whim and fancies of your mother lust. Ho, you penis. Ho.

He let his shirt drop and looked at his hairy legs.

Those are my legs, he decided. Mine. He had to repeat it. For it was hard to believe. A man could drift away and stop up his thoughts and let them lag behind like drugged children while he wandered on ahead.

Then he was without thought and stared with bovine eyes, wondering nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing. And his body was someone else then. It did not belong to him. That underwear. It wasn’t his. It was someone else underwear. He was a watching specter, hovering and looking in the bathroom reek. He was nothing, certainly not an underwear bearing animal.

It is this, the planning went on unfettered by his fancies and rising to the top for a second. You simply must have this money. There’s no other point to argue. And the end justified the means. Therefore…

He ran a finger over his legs. The finger pushed the dark hairs out of its way. Then the hairs curled back into place. He did the same thing again.

He pressed his finger into his left leg. He pressed hard. Then he pulled away the finger and looked at the white spot. Me? He kept asking. Me?

He took hold of his penis. It was warm and soft. Incredible, he thought, here in this center of nothing, in this cavern of green plaster and hanging odors. I hold a penis, warm and malleable It must be a sign, a message from up there.

He looked up there.

There was a cockroach on the far wall, hanging head down over the bathtub.

Its quivering antennae reached out and searched, brushing threadlike over the plaster. He watched the cockroach as it walked in tiny spurts. Beastie, he thought, thing that goes bump in the night. He thought of Kafka’s hero and wondered what his reaction would be if that cockroach were to suddenly swell up and be as large as him.

The thought of it dropping heavily into the bathtub and then clambering over the side and reaching out for him with its fish pole antennae made him shudder.

His face grew hard. He swept away everything, crying out without a sound – Why do I think! I want to stop thinking!

The answer formed quickly. Some sort of answer always did.

Because you are poor, it said, because you are victimized. That is why you think on and on.

No. He had to throw over the answer. It was too pat, too encompassing. He did not trust it.

Inner machinations spreading. Inner plans creeping into light. The reasoning went on, breaking surface. Well, it was true. Wasn’t it true? Leo didn’t love him. That was a lie right from the start, a rationalization on her part to coalesce her libido with her imagined moral code. And, whether she was aware of it or not, she was out to get what she could from him.

Who else was there? Lynn? No, Lynn didn’t care anymore either. That was a thing of the past; as dead as a rusty doornail. And he didn’t like Lynn. The antipathies evened out and flattened the surface of their once intense relationship.

There was no one else.

He stared at the floor angrily and bitterly, feeling again the sense of betrayal that had some upon him with more and more frequency in the past few years. A sense that he had not been given the chance others had been given. A sense that all events conspired to defeat him.

Looking up, he snatched a piece of slimy-bottomed soap from the sink and hurled it at the cockroach.

The gold-green insect bulleted down the wall and disappeared behind the bathtub.

Bastard! He raged,
stupid, futile bastard
!

And his writing was no good. It was impossible. How could he write when he lived in this trap of hopes? Was it possible to write when bugs did dances on the walls, when cars and busses roared and yelled out their deafening growls twenty-four hours a day and the elevated trains came grinding and screeching into the station, disgorging people, waking him, distracting him, whipping him down the path to failure?

“No!”
was the answer, half shouted in a voice hollow and dry.

No. You can’t write under such conditions. No. He said it again to emphasize it on himself and was almost content in accepting the fact. At least it made excuses easier and gave the entire problem an air of simplicity, of understandable justification. No matter what I do, he told himself, I have it coming to me. It was not possible to hope for any other good in this haven for all things bad.

He was sick of the bathroom.

He got up quickly and jerked paper from the rack. It snapped at him like an irate turtle. He wiped and dropped the paper down and flushed the toilet. Flushing this, the thought occurred to him, is like trying to make a horse’s ass fragrant by dusting it.

He unfastened the door lock and went into the dim, dust-hanging hallway.

Then at the door to his room…

He stopped, his heart suddenly pounding.

No seeming reason. The joints were invisible. What had formed the links was unknown to him.

But, abruptly, he thought of the old man in the pawn shop. The old man with his money in a lead box. The crouched ugly old man with the hair-sprouting wart on his chin. The old man who would offer him nine dollars for the watch his mother gave him.

Money and the old man.

Quickly rising now, a strange excitement possessed him as he went in his room and locked himself in. Like some trembling conspirator who had suddenly deduced the method by which to overthrow the tyrant’s throne.

How fantastic! He thought elatedly. How utterly fantastic that I never thought of it before.

He walked quickly to the bed and sat down, leaned back against the head that was like a prison window. He heard an elevated train come grating to a halt and there was thunder far away.

You think in layers.

That was it.

Incredible that he’d never realized it before. You think in layers and each layer you build up or have built up for you makes you more a victim of society’s mores. Each added layer weighs you down more, makes you more vacillating and will-less.

But they wear away. His eyes were bright and almost feverish as he understood it at last; this fabulous secret. Yes, that was the weakness –
they wear away!
You lived like this, you were forced into grasping path and soon the layers wore away.

The bottom layer was the animal.

He’d almost reached it. He had just stripped off another layer. Sitting there in the bathroom, the last remnants of it had fallen off. Through the last week, month, year, he had been working it off, thread by thread, all unseen, until now, when he was walking from the bathroom to his room, the last fragment of morality had fluttered down and died.

And he realized for the first time that a man who had not should not cry out – pity!