Hunger and Thirst (70 page)

“I … I have to get a room,” Erick said “I can’t stay with my sister.”

“Why?”

“Oh.” He turned away and took the glass off the bedside table and took a long drink from it. “It’s not my sister so much. It’s her husband. I might kill him.”

“You can stay here until you find a place.” Lynn said.

Erick swallowed. “Thanks.”

They had another drink. They talked about college days and people they had known. They avoided talking about his mother or Sally. Erick pretended he didn’t know his mother was dead. He let himself get drunk. He let the room lose shape and the fires bank in his body.

“I think I’ll take a shower,” Lynn said, “I reek.”

“Okay,” Erick said.

Lynn stood up and walked into the bathroom. He didn’t close the door. Erick heard the shower go on. He lay there staring at the creamy white ceiling. He felt the drink filling him with fuzzy warmth. For some reason he found himself listening to the sound of Lynn’s taking a shower. He touched himself. He found that his heart was beating quickly.

He snapped up his head from a doze and saw Lynn standing over the bed naked and dripping wet. He was weaving and looking down at Erick. Erick felt something stirring in his body. He felt his stomach muscles tighten. He looked over Lynn’s body. He made no motion as Lynn reached down and opened the pajamas.

“It’s time, baby,” Lynn said, breathing hard, “Turn out the light.” His face was a sensual mask, his eyes half shut …

Erick hesitated. Then something broke.

“All right!” he said, almost angry, almost as if arguing with someone.

He reached out with a vicious gesture and turned out the lamp.

“All right!” he snarled, reaching out and grabbing.

* * * *

He couldn’t sleep. He lay there tossing, still naked, no longer drunk. He looked over at Lynn who was snoring. Lynn’s hand was still on Erick’s leg. Erick pulled away. His stomach hurt. He stood up on the floor. There was a cool breeze coming through the window.

He stumbled into the dark hallway and into the bathroom. He stood tensely in the darkness wondering if he should turn on the light. He ran his hands over the cool shape of the sink. Then he ran himself a drink of water. He sat down on the toilet and drank the water and stared at the dark wall.

Something began.

Slowly, like someone pouring hot water into him, little by little. It dripped on him and in him endlessly, building up until it became a sloshing pool in him, inundating his organs. He sat there shivering and staring at the wall. He was trying to think, trying to use his mind. But it was as if every time he tried to think, raw emotion would shove the thought aside.

He heard a sound in the kitchen and was covered with a sudden chill. For a moment he actually believed that his mother was coming to haunt him. He jumped up and stood in the doorway, staring into the living room, almost expecting to see her come fluttering out of the kitchen, white and vengeful. His heart beat in huge rapid beats. He stepped back and sat down heavily. He writhed in fearful agony. His stomach began to burn. He heard Lynn snoring contendedly in the bedroom.

Suddenly he had the vision of Sally standing over him and Lynn before, watching in silent terror. And the idea that Lynn had finally won his victory after all those years made him twitch violently. Breaths poured from his lungs, his heart best faster and faster. He felt some sort of climax approaching. It couldn’t go on like that. Something had to give.

“Mother,” he moaned, “Mom.”

His fingers twitched and the glass shattered on the floor.

YES!

He slid wildly off the bowl and dropped with a convulsive sob to his knees. He felt his right knee gouged by a piece of glass. He gasped at the pain but slapped around crazily until he found a dagger of glass.

Without hesitation he threw up his hand and jerked the sharp glass edge over his throat. He felt a thin line of pain across the flesh and a sudden dripping of blood, on his chest. He sliced impotently at his wrists. He sawed at them with a feverish anger and hysteria. He hacked at them and felt blood running and pain of severed capillaries. Then he dropped the glass and crouched there shivering, his chest heaving with breaths and throbbing with wild heart beats.

“Oh!”

He was afraid. Suddenly he was afraid. He pushed up, slipped, fell on his knees. He pushed up again, the pain burning in his wrists. Something gave and he heard a spurt of blood hit the floor like water from a spilled glass.

He staggered into the hallway, into the bedroom feeling his blood spatter on the floor, grabbing one wrist with shaking fingers, trying to stop the flow and feeling the hot blood running over his fingers, escaping.

“Lynn!” he screamed, “
Lynn!”

He heard Lynn grunt and sit up suddenly. He heard the blood running, it seemed, faster and faster. Weakness was beginning to cover him.

“Lynn, I’m bleeding to death!”

“What!”

Lynn jolted up and the lamplight flung itself out on Erick. Lynn stood there staring at him, mouth wide, one hand pressed to his cheek in horror.

“Lynn, I’m …” Erick sank to his knees.

“God help me,” he moaned sadly, “I’m going to die now.”

* * * *

All was lost in a blur of motion and lights.

It seemed as if that hour were raced like a film run at top speed. It was a cloud of events made up of tightening belts around his wrists and wrapping a towel around his throat. Hurrying down the elevator and into Lynn’s car, driving at top speed to the nearest hospital. Then, of white halls and white-garbed nurses and doctors. And him numbed going through it all like a dizzy, half interested spectator.

And thinking of only one thing; muttering it over and over.

“Lynn, I broke your glass. I’m sorry. I’ll reimburse you. I assure you of that. I broke your glass. Lynn, I … “

And they kept telling him to be quiet. Then finally he fainted and sank into hot blackness. And drifted around in a slow lazy tide of pain, just on the surface like a hollow pea pod.

All afternoon he stared at the ceiling.

Not an inch of him moved. He didn’t see anything but the visions in his mind. He didn’t hear anything but the voices of lost people. He didn’t feel anything but a tickling in his throat and the sensation of something bumping endlessly in his chest. He thought it was two people walking about in his chest and, meeting, unable to get past each other because they kept stepping the same way as the other one. He didn’t smell anything but the dead, putrefying mucous in his throat and mouth. He didn’t taste anything. The buds were as hard as wood.

Outside the casual Saturday traffic grumbled in the streets.

Half-day workers were gone from the buildings. Only a few remained in the restaurants and drug and cigar stores and the four men in the four newsstands under the elevated steps. Trains ran infrequently. Everything was slowed down.

It was a grey cloudy day. There were long continents of storm clouds hanging around the edges of the sky. All day it looked like rain. But it never rained. It was gloomy all afternoon. It got dark early.

All evening he lay there on the bed, a dead weight, eyes wide and staring, his body, corpselike, except for the shallow almost imperceptible movement of his chest.

A door shut loudly.

His mind fluttered. It was dead silent in the street.

The house was a listening box. He lay there dry and stiffening, his wide, frozen eyes staring up at the ceiling, at the sky, at the universe, at eternity.

“Money first or no pussy!” came the simpering voice of a whore.

“Come on bitch, take it off!” said the drunk, drunk.

Erick Linstrom, 27, lay dying in the night.

“Oh no!”

Flat mirthless laughter. “Money first or no pussy!”

“God damn whore!”

A lurching sound, a creak of wood, a body falling on the bed. A muffled curse, a phlegmy cough.

“You ain’t gettin’ none free from me!” she snapped in her tinny voice, “I
sell
it!”

She laughed drunkenly and there was silence while a shattered man thumbed at his grease-lined wallet.

Erick Linstrom, six foot and a quarter inch, heard his mind praying to someone he did not even understand. Dry flaking lips twitching an
Our Father which art in Heaven
…

“That’s
better!”

Nasty and hard and calculating. Sound of handbag clicking open, crumpled bills deposited in a powdery grave suffocated in thick perfumey oven of leather. Handbag dropped on the floor. Rustle of skirt.

“Here ya are, ya bastard!
Take
it!”

Clothes being pulled off ruthlessly. Watery slurping kisses. Hot, dirty hands, feeling, squeezing, pushing, holding. “Strip me, baby, strip me!”

Thy will be done on earth

Eyes that would weep but cannot. Erick Linstrom, 135 pounds, sinking into the black pattern of forever.

“Why don’t ya shave, ya shaggy bastard!”

Blatent prostitute cry. Grunts, slurps, tongues licking, hot flesh pressed together. “Give it to me, give it to me!”

The night defiled by grunts and gasps of animal possession. The darkness vile with panted dialogue of lust. Bed springs shrieking out abuse, excess. Ugly white limbs entwined, hairy stomachs sucking wetly together, air spinning, bubbling with the reek of unclean cavities.

And forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who
…

Hands like twisted claws. Legs like worm-eaten logs. Torso like a hollow rotten barrel. Erick Linstrom, male, breathing in night and death.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!”

Lord, I am coming.

Heaving, twisting, burning legs and arms, beer soaked breaths mingling. Stomachs pressing. Male animal and female animal copulating. Passage of sperm.

Erick Linstrom, writer and lover and student and robber and paralytic and staring death’s head thinking out a final prayer without mind.
For thine is the kingdom and power and

The drunk rolled off the whore, coughing.

He scratched his testicles and grunted. He coughed and spit on the floor. “Ya pig!” said the whore, scratching her white belly with one hand.

They both fell asleep and snored. Then they woke up and did it again and the handbag clicked open again. Then they snored again. And the third time was on the house.

While Erick Linstrom, cold and dying, looked up and saw nothing but gathering night in the morning.

* * * *

It was upon him.

Breath rattled and clicked in his throat.

His body was stiffening, stiffening.

His right hand closed into a fist. His mouth pulled open, splitting membranes. Blood and pus dripped into his mouth. His eyes were like rock.

Jesus, Jesus!

He hung naked on the cross and felt the burning pain in his palms where the nails had been driven through flesh. He felt the wooden crossbars under his arms and under his trunk. He shook with an agony of cramps.
Oh my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!

Legs stiffening, arms stiffening, neck a brittle column running with maggots chewing, chewing!

Head a swelling, bursting balloon!

I thirst, I thirst!

A roman soldier pressing a sponge to his lips. The bitter, acrid soldiers drink touching his lips, in his mouth tasting like blood and pus.

Oh my god, the
pain!

The shrieking, howling, tearing, twisting pain! The agony. The white agony!

GOD SAVE ME!

Breaths tore from his cracked lips. Hot air sucked back into his failing lungs, burning, scorching. The sky was” black, thunder shook the clouds. Something was burning. A frightened soldier jabbing at his side. Shooting pain in his back, blood dripping, spinal fluid emptying.

GOD!!! Please. Oh please. Please! Shrieks from the hillside. Women weeping. The earth trembling. The skies splitting open with light and thunder, the earth parting, swallowing. He was throbbing on the cross, crying out to the heavens …

The room swept around him.

No.
No! NO!
He tried to howl Save me! Save me! I want to live. End my pain! I want to live, I want to live!

LET ME LIVE!

Crushing walls shuffling in on hating feet. Crushing ceiling falling down. The bed shaking. The building shaking. The earth, the world shaking open for him. He screamed and tried to fling up his arms.
NO!!!!!

Suffocation. He couldn’t get any air in his lungs. Someone was holding him under in a vacuum. No air would rush in. Sudden shuddering breaths jerked in his chest, his eyes grew wider still, his blackened dried up tongue touched his lips.

He was falling, falling, falling away.

MOTHER!!

Silence.

The silence of a forest in the still of morning.

The crackling silence of a polar night.

The silence of the grave.

Silence before the word. Breathless still preceding breath itself.

Mindless wastes of land sky. Palpable lack of all life and sound. A green silence.

No sound enough to stay itself from being swallowed up in the gigantic silence. A great ball of vegetation spinning in mists of silence.

Silence of the sky.

The creeping, flooding, crushing silence of the swinging planets, of the system, of the galaxy, of the endless black rocking universe.

Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. SILENCE. SILENCE. SILENCE.

SILENCE. Silence, silence, sil …

* * * *

The sun came up early and it was a lovely morning.

The temperature was 63 and the humidity was 85 and the wind was from the East.

A little after 10 o’clock, a department of sanitation truck flushed the streets clean.

What I seemed to be involved in, as I read, was a form of psychological time travel; a journey which took me back fifty and more years to encounter my nineteen to twenty-three-year-old self.

I found the encounter to be as discomfiting as it was intriguing.

Literally, I regretted that I was compelled to meet that person again and to have to face the fact that he was not completely a fictional character at all but me as I had very much been at that time.