Manhattan Noir 2 (11 page)
What’s the good of jumping now? Where is there to run to now? And the light teases my eyes. I see all sorts of interlocked and colored soap bubbles that aren’t there.
It’s more awkward getting back inside than it was getting out. And with the light on me, and them watching me, there’s a self-consciousness that was missing in my uninhibited outward surge. I have to straighten out one leg first and dip it into the room toes forward, the way you test the water in a pool before you jump in. Then the other leg, and then I’m in. The roundness of the light beam is broken into long thin tatters as the blind rolls down over it, but it still stays on out there.
There are only two points of light in the whole room—I mean, in addition to the indirect reflection through the blind. Which gives off a sort of phosphorescent haziness—two points so small that if you didn’t know they were there and looked for them, you wouldn’t see them. And small as both are, one is even smaller than the other. One is the tiny light in the radio, which, because the lens shielding the dial is convex, glows like a miniature orange scimitar. I go over to it to turn it off. It can’t keep the darkness away anymore; the darkness is here.
“Here’s to the losers,” the radio is saying. “Here’s to them all—”
The other point of light is over by the door. It’s in the door itself. I go over there close to it, peering with my head bowed, as if I were mourning inconsolably. And I am. One of the four tiny screwheads set into the corners of the oblong plate that holds the lock is gone, is out now, and if you squint at an acute angle you can see a speck of orange light shining through it from the hall. Then, while I’m standing there, something falls soundlessly, glances off the top of my shoe with no more weight than a grain of gravel, and there’s a second speck of orange light at the opposite upper corner of the plate. Two more to go now. Two and a half minutes of deft work left, maybe not even that much.
What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man’s life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.
I can’t get out the window, I can’t go out the door. But there
is
a way out, a third way. I can escape inward. If I can’t get away from them on the outside, I can get away from them on the inside.
You’re not supposed to have those things. But when you have money you can get anything, in New York. They were on a prescription, but that was where the money came in—getting the prescription. I remember now. Some doctor gave it to me—sold it to me—long ago. I don’t remember why or when. Maybe when fear first came between the two of us and I couldn’t reach her anymore.
I came across it in my wallet on Wednesday, after I first came in here, and I sent it out to have it filled, knowing that this night would come. I remember the bellboy bringing it to the door afterward in a small bright-green paper wrapping that some pharmacists use. But where is it now?
I start a treasure hunt of terror, around the inside of the room in the dark. First into the clothes closet, wheeling and twirling among the couple of things I have hanging in there like a hopped-up discothèque dancer, dipping in and out of pockets, patting some of them between my hands to see if they’re flat or hold a bulk. As if I were calling a little pet dog to me by clapping my hands to it. A little dog who is hiding away from me in there, a little dog called death.
Not in there. Then the drawers of the dresser, spading them in and out, fast as a card shuffle. A telephone directory, a complimentary shaving kit (if you’re a man), a complimentary manicure kit (if you’re a girl).
They must be down to the last screwhead by now.
Then around and into the bathroom, while the remorseless dismantling at the door keeps on. It’s all white in there, white as my face must be. It’s dark, but you can still see that it’s white against the dark. Twilight-colored tiles. I don’t put on the light to help me find them, because there isn’t enough time left; the lights in here are fluorescent and take a few moments to come on, and by that time they’ll be in here.
There’s a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: “
There
he is.” As though you were the most important one of all. (And you’re not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren’t.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you’re not.) It’s a nice little tribute, and it don’t cost anyone a cent.
And so I say this to them now, as I find them on the top glass slab of the shallow medicine cabinet:
There
you are. Glad to see you—you’re important in my scheme of things.
As I bend for some running water, the shower curtain twines around me in descending spiral folds—don’t ask me how, it must have been ballooning out. I sidestep like a drunken Roman staggering around his toga, pulling half the curtain down behind me while the pins holding it to the rod about tinkle like little finger cymbals, dragging part of it with me over one shoulder, while I bend over the basin to drink.
No time to rummage for a tumbler. It’s not there anyway—I’d been using it for the rye. So I use the hollow of one hand for a scoop, pumping it up and down to my open mouth and alternating with one of the nuggets from the little plastic container I’m holding uncapped in my other hand. I’ve been called a fast drinker at times. Johnny used to say—never mind that now.
I only miss one—that falls down in the gap between me and the basin to the floor. That’s a damned good average. There were twelve of them in there, and I remember the label read:
Not more than three to be taken during any twenty-four-hour period
. In other words, I’ve just killed myself three times, with a down payment on a fourth time for good measure.
I grab the sides of the basin suddenly and bend over it, on the point of getting them all out of me again in rebellious upheaval.
I
don’t want to, but they do. I fold both arms around my middle, hugging myself, squeezing myself, to hold them down. They stay put. They’ve caught on, taken hold. Only a pump can get them out now. And after a certain point of no return (I don’t know how long that is), once they start being assimilated into the bloodstream, not even a pump can get them out.
Only a little brine taste shows up in my mouth, and gagging a little, still holding my middle, I go back into the other room. Then I sit down to wait. To see which of them gets to me first.
It goes fast now, like a drumbeat quickening to a climax. An upended foot kicks at the door, and it suddenly spanks inward with a firecracker sound. The light comes fizzing through the empty oblong like gushing carbonation, too sudden against the dark to ray clearly at first.
They rush in like the splash of a wave that suddenly has splattered itself all around the room. Then the lights are on, and they’re on all four sides of me, and they’re holding me hard and fast, quicker than one eyelid can touch the other in a blink.
My arms go behind me into the cuffless convolutions of a strait jacket. Then as though unconvinced that this is enough precaution, someone standing back there has looped the curve of his arm around my throat and the back of the chair, and holds it there in tight restraint. Not choking-tight as in a mugging, but ready to pin me back if I should try to heave out of the chair.
Although the room is blazing-bright, several of them are holding flashlights, all lit and centered inward on my face from the perimeter around me, like the spokes of a blinding wheel. Probably to disable me still further by their dazzle. One beam, more skeptical than the others, travels slowly up and down my length, seeking out any bulges that might possibly spell a concealed offensive weapon. My only weapon is already used, and it was a defensive one.
I roll my eyes toward the ceiling to try and get away from the lights, and one by one they blink and go out.
There they stand. The assignment is over, completed. To me it’s my life, to them just another incident. I don’t know how many there are. The man in the coffin doesn’t count the number who have come to the funeral. But as I look at them, as my eyes go from face to face, on each one I read the key to what the man is thinking.
One face, soft with compunction: Poor guy, I might have been him, he might have been me.
One, hard with contempt: Just another of those creeps something went wrong with along the way.
Another, flexing with hate: I wish he’d shown some fight; I’d like an excuse to—
Still another, rueful with impatience: I’d like to get this over so I could call her unexpectedly and catch her in a lie; I bet she never stayed home tonight like she told me she would.
And yet another, blank with indifference, its thoughts a thousand miles away: And what’s a guy like Yastrzemski got, plenty of others guy haven’t got too? It’s just the breaks, that’s all—
And I say to my own thoughts dejectedly: Why weren’t you that clear, that all-seeing, the other night, that terrible other night. It might have done you more good then.
There they stand. And there I am, seemingly in their hands but slowly slipping away from them.
They don’t say anything. I’m not aware of any of them saying anything. They’re waiting for someone to give them further orders. Or maybe waiting for something to come and take me away.
One of them hasn’t got a uniform on or plainsclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.
The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.
In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.
She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.
“Then it wasn’t—you?” I whisper.
She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.” But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.
The preventive has come too late.
She moves a step closer and bends toward me.
“Careful—watch it,” a voice warns her.
“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.
She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny—it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.
This story.
Afterword to “New York Blues”: “New York Blues”
(Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine,
December 1970) is the last, best, and bleakest of the original stories
EQMM
founding editor Frederic Dannay bought from Woolrich during their long association. Within its minimalist storyline we find virtually every motif, belief, device that had pervaded Woolrich’s fiction for generations: flashes of word magic, touches of evocative song lyrics, love and loneliness, madness and death, paranoia, partial amnesia, total despair. If this was the last story Woolrich completed, he couldn’t have ended his career more fittingly.
(Originally published in 1845)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless
here
for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
“’Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,